Kuon is reminiscent of Fatal Frame, with a female character wandering Asian architectural structures while being attacked by ghosts and other creepy, angry entities, but instead of fighting with a camera, you use magic and a melee weapon. The game is also a bit more cartoonish looking, and therefore more reminiscent of games from the PS1 era.
Most notable is that you play through the entire game by completing three different phases, each with a different character, with none of your inventory carrying over to the next character, and with only slightly different experiences. For the most part it’s pretty typical survival horror—fight enemies, collect items, read notes, solve puzzles, run back and forth a lot, etc.
YIN PHASE
The magic adds something a little different, with magic cards you gather serving as your “ammo”, and the different cards providing unique attacks. Some of the magic options are animals you conjure and just unleash on your enemies instead of fighting them yourself. Such an odd game. You also have the option of using melee weapons for one button and cards for the other. During the Yin phase you have various knife options for melee. Unfortunately, the magic combat is not very responsive and it doesn’t auto aim. You’ll find yourself throwing weapons such as fireballs in what you assume is a targeted line only to see the fire pass right by the enemy, plus each magic spell usage is prefaced with animation of your character igniting the magic, so instead of instantaneous attacks, there’s a delay when you try strike the enemy!
There are healing items, but you also can simply meditate by pressing R1, which totally chills you out. Note this also takes a moment of action from the character and you can be struck by enemies while in the process of meditating. You collect little boats to use for saves, which are a sort of stone/fire conglomeration by the edge of the water—it’s very calming when you watch your save boat float away. You actually can gather more of these save boats as well as health when you fight the most common enemy—an annoying little bald bugger that gloms onto you in between you taking swipes at him. If you kill any enemies with a final blow (hit them melee style while they’re down on the ground), they leave behind a little bonus item. Yay!
While not as atmospheric and suspenseful as Fatal Frame, the game does deliver some great jump scares, including hot spots of dark energy that give you a jolt. You can’t avoid them because you can’t see them, and they can also lead you to getting “vertigo”, causing everything to go fuzzy. You can’t use magic when you’re experiencing vertigo, but you can shake it off by meditating.
Opening doors requires using cloths designated with the symbols on those doors, which means tracking down the clothes before you can enter certain places to progress.
The problem with the enemies in this game is that most of them are just an annoyance, not scary. Whereas the ghosts in Fatal Frame are unique and freaky, these enemies are cheaply designed and have obnoxious attack patterns. As for bosses, they take tons of magic cards to kill.
Once you get to the underground tunnels in the later part of this phase, the game becomes more creepy and atmospheric. There’s even a frustrating segment in which you are plagued by a hallucinatory state, and everything is blurry and shaky.
After doing some other exploring and fighting back above ground, including a boss, you end up down below again in a maze of tunnels. And get this. You’d have no way of knowing this without a walkthrough, but while you’re busy following bloodstained floors on purpose, which are intended to steer you in the right direction, at one point you enter a room with a tiny puddle of blood in the middle, and if you step on it you get sucked in and it’s game over. WTF?
Soon after a little more exploring, there’s a very anti-climactic ending to this first part, with no boss battle. Just the way I like it.
YANG PHASE
Once you finish the first phase, it’s not as if you continue the game automatically. You completely finish the game and can then choose to play the Yang Phase as a new game.
With the second character, instead of knives, you have a hand fan as your melee weapon. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it does slice and dice enemies like the knife.
However, while this second playthrough is different in the order in which you do things, much of it features the same exact scenarios and puzzles in the same locations, mostly with only unique cut scenes as the major difference in the storyline for this phase. Even so, you seriously have to use a walkthrough, because there is rarely any clue as to what you’re supposed to do next. Many times you’ll be running from one end of the map to another even with the walkthrough.
There is one cool but really hard centipede lady boss in the Yang phase that isn’t in the Yin phase, and late in the game you encounter both an invincible ghost woman you just have to run away from and a gorilla creature that is very strong.
Soon after that there’s a terrifying moment when you have to look through the window of a hut, watch a huge Yeti beast until he leaves it, then run inside quickly and grab three items before he comes back. Unfortunately, seconds later he chases you in the woods! Eek! It is ridiculous how hard this game suddenly gets. He’s fast, he kicks your ass in seconds, and there’s limited space to run around him. You’ll need lots of health and lots of magic cards to take him down.
You end up underground again, and if you walk too far into one of the final rooms, which has a save in a door just to the right, you trigger a cutscene and then can’t access the save after it anymore! WTF? Moments later you encounter the invincible ghost again and must get around her to reach a door that ends this phase.
KUON PHASE
This is an extremely short phase just to tie up the loose ends of the story. With this character you simply cover some old sites again and eventually get to the tough final boss. Only thing I’ll say about this phase is that you get very few of those save boats, so make sure to hold onto one for the final save before the boss…which you’ll only find if you follow a walkthrough.
