Welcome to Kowloon Review (Xbox Series X|S & PC)

Leaky drainpipes, frail voices, and towering alleys of concrete and glass, loose brick and stone fabricate the walls of Welcome to Kowloon’s brief supernaturally inclined corridor horror. Suspicious scenery ferries its complex architecture, yet a cocktail of bravery and naivety pull you ever deeper into its lost clauses and down through a rabbit hole of dubious conditions and unfathomable personalities.

Desperate to claim affordable housing in the backend of a forgotten city, you branch out to unravel its true nature, with one foot in the door and the other in the heart of an unforgiving horror story. It all seems like a bad dream, yet you have nowhere else to go. Secrets run rampant and bleed through the cracks of the walls, yet you continue to hold the veil, eager to prove that even the darkest of places can be kept hidden.

It begins with a spiraling alley, a harrowing dilemma, and an overbearing stone complex of shard and stone. You enter its world, not with the intent to gradually unravel a mystery, but to locate a haven for you to hang your coat. The denizens seem ordinary at first, yet you know deep down that something about them isn’t quite right. Fifty minutes — that’s all you need to unlock the door and unmask its contents. The spirit of Kowloon resides in the balance, and it wants you to tip the scales in its favor.

Billed as a traditional walking simulator, Welcome to Kowloon invites you to fill the shoes of a protagonist who, after stumbling across the threshold and into a morally ambiguous part of town, decides to find a spot to call home. With a labyrinth of brick and shadow to guide you, you find the chance to embrace the world with false hope from an intimate perspective. Things, as ordinary as they may seem at first, hold a much, much darker meaning. It’s simply your job to make sense of it all over an hour-long deep dive into the densely populated gargantuan quarters of Kowloon.

While there isn’t a lot of gameplay for you to sink your teeth into in Welcome to Kowloon, the game itself has a lot of great talking points to pique your interest. With striking visuals, well-orchestrated jump scares, and a dense atmosphere that quite clearly has the power to put a few extra hairs to your neck, there’s a serviceable horror here that works well with what it has in its toolkit. It’s rather short, but it does cram a good amount into its runtime, with tense moments, eerie aesthetics and harrowing dilemmas that keep you on your toes throughout.

Sadly, there isn’t much of a plot for you to break down here. In fact, Welcome to Kowloon doesn’t spend a lot of time fleshing out the details at all. Rather, it drops you in at the deep end, and it provides you with a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, with frequent audio cues and disturbing imagery there to guide you through its tightly packed environment. But that’s a walking sim: short, to the point, and unapologetically reliant on audiovisual storytelling. Welcome to Kowloon simply leans into the cliche without thinking twice about the secondary aspects. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you.

Plot-wise, Welcome to Kowloon is spread rather thin. As the unnamed protagonist, you essentially find yourself trapped in a peculiar apartment complex in the famed Walled City. A landlord bolts the door shut, and, for some reason that’s unknown to you, the world relies on your escapist tendencies to find the key. That’s about as deep as this short tale goes. It doesn’t leave much to the imagination, though it does, in all honesty, pepper its forgettable plot with a surprisingly strong climax. But of course, I won’t be the one to spoil that grand finale.

When Welcome to Kowloon finds its rhythm, it works well as a genuinely unnerving corridor thriller. With admirable jump scares that wax all of the right spots and a chilling atmosphere that caters to traditional Chinese folklore, it often hits the nail on the head. Its story is somewhat meaningless and without the full weight of a fleshed out game, to say the least, yet it finds its stride in its world-building capabilities and its natural ability to keep its audience engaged for the short term, nonetheless.

Welcome to Kowloon doesn’t exactly beat around the bush with its opening statement. True to the point of the material, it tells you that you can grovel through the campaign in a little under an hour, and it gives you something to work towards. And, frankly, that’s both a blessing and a curse here; the short campaign bodes well for those in dire need of a quick fix, yet it also leaves a lot to be desired. A meatier campaign, in this case, would have been a lot more effective.

If you’re a fan of wall-to-wall jump scares and dense level design, claustrophobic areas and bone-shattering audio cues, then you’ll probably get a kick out of Welcome to Kowloon. If, however, you’re looking for something that caters to more than psychologically demanding tropes, then you might want to consider taking your ball and chain elsewhere. Kowloon is a great place to spend a night, but sadly there’s just not enough here that’ll make you want to extend your stay.

Verdict

Welcome to Kowloon provides a short, detailed, and surprisingly gripping psychological horror experience that, while still rather short and lackluster in various aspects of its gameplay, is bound to get the cogs in your head turning. It might not be the lengthiest corridor thriller on the market, but thanks to its claustrophobic design and serviceable execution, it is a game that has the power to keep you on tenterhooks. Could it be longer? Absolutely. Would it benefit from a few additional bells and whistles? Yes. Though, for what it’s worth, I’m inclined to believe that there are more strengths than weaknesses here. Stick around long enough, and you might just be able to see them.