Of the three games I have spoken about this month, I am willing to bet that Kuon is the one that has been heard of the least. It released in 2004 when classic survival horror was kind of dying out. The second half of the PS2’s life cycle definitely saw a decline in classic survival horror games and Kuon was very much caught up in that. It also doesn’t help that it isn’t the most unique of games either, at least when it compares to other survival horror games. However, nowadays, I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. Not only that, even back when it released, it had plenty of unique aspects when it came to the story, setting, and combat! It also doesn’t help that when it released, the game’s developer wasn’t exactly well known. At least compared to how known they are now! Yeah, you read the title of this post right. The developer of Kuon was none other than FromSoftware! The developers of the Soul series! And bizarrely, the games actually have some similarities. But I’m getting ahead of myself! Before getting to that, let’s talk more about the game and its setting and some of those more unique aspects.

Kuon is very much a classic survival horror game! And very heavily inspired by Resident Evil. The game has fixed camera angles and, thankfully, tank controls, and the game even has you picking between two different characters who play through the game differently! Much like Resident Evil 1 and 2. However, where the game differs from Resident Evil is its setting.

Most horror games of this time often took place in modern day or sometime pretty close by, and usually they had you in pretty regular settings. Like a castle, mansion, or places like that. Kuon is quite a bit different in this aspect as the game takes place in the Heian period of Japanese history. For a frame of reference for some fellow gamers, this was a couple hundred years before the time period when Ghost of Tsushima is set, so around the year 800 AD to 1000 AD. This isn’t something you really need to know for the game, in fact I had to look this info up to make sure I’m getting it right, but it does affect how the game looks and its setting as a whole! Because I could tell you Kuon takes place in a manor and while I would be correct in saying that, you’d probably be really confused when you played the game and saw what that manor looked like. The game takes place in the Fujiware Manor specifically as well as some of the surrounding areas like the mountain and totally not evil underground passages. This setting is honestly extremely refreshing for someone like me who plays a lot of survival horror games! The only games that come close are Fatal Frame, which is set during modern day but does take place in older sections of Japan, and Onimusha, another survival horror game set in the past of Japan but with an extremely different feel from something like Fatal Frame or Kuon! I may talk about that game sometime in the future as well.

Beyond just the setting, the actual story and set up are pretty unique to Kuon as well. When it comes to horror games zombies, demons, ghosts, and general monsters are pretty normal for the scene. However, what isn’t normal for the scene is bizarre silk worms and the demons they create… I don’t want to get too ahead of myself since, like I keep saying, discovering a horror game’s story is a big part of the enjoyment of horror games but I have to address this a bit as it’s pretty unique to Kuon!

Like I was saying before, Kuon has you pick between two characters at the start or more specifically it has you picking between the Yin and Yang phases of the game. You see, a big theme of the game is Onmyōdō, which is basically the practice of seeing the future with the aid of astronomy and calendars based on the yin and yang five phases. However, when it comes to Kuon, they are more or less exorcists sent places to remove evil spirits and purify places. The English translation straight up calls the people who practice Onmyōdō exorcists. I couldn’t really figure out if real onmyōji, those who practice Onmyōdō, ever did this but I figured I’d mention it just in case! Plus it’s just a cool fact about the game. I mainly bring this up because some key characters of the game practice Onmyōdō, including one of the main playable characters.

The plot of the game is basically that some crazy things are happening at Fujiwara Manor and the lord of the manor requests the aid of Ashiya Dōman, a well experienced onmyōji that lives near by and real person in history as I found out, to come and help purify the manor. The game has you playing as Dōman’s daughter, Utsuki, in the Yin phase and as onmyōji in training, Sakuya, in the Yang phase. Regardless of who you pick, the game will always take place in Fujiwara Manor! The main difference between the two is the story you will be experiencing as well as couple of different places you’ll visit as each. For example, Sakuya has a section in the mountains while Utsuki does not. They will also get different weapons and spells, more on that later, and sometimes have different fights. Both are about the same length with Sakuya’s phase being just a bit longer in my experience. That being said, it doesn’t particularly matter who you pick first as the game will encourage you to play them both! And you should since it’ll help you fully understand the story!

Speaking of said story, you might be wondering if you need to have some kind of knowledge of Japanese history to really enjoy it but I can firmly say you do not, as I had no idea about this game’s story and how it ties into actual Japanese history before playing it. In fact, when doing some extra research for this post, I think knowing the actual history kind of spoils some things about it? Regardless, don’t let that stop you from enjoying the game or giving it a go! Especially because if you decide not to because of that, you are robbing yourself from a really cool and super freaky story!

I’m not going to go into too much more detail on the story from here now that I set it up, but I did want to just say that I love how the story unfolds and reveals more about what’s going on in the manor and how things got to the point they are at by the start of the game. The things that have been going on in the manor are super freaky in the best way possible! Finding notes and such scattered around the manor that help paint a picture of how things got this way is perfect, and while that’s not unique to Kuon, the game does do a particularly good job of it especially since a lot of the information you’ll be finding out ties heavily into what’s going on with one of the lead characters. And I’ll just say this, the game certainly got me more freaked out about basic boxes than any other game I’ve played…

Moving on from that though, let’s talk about the game’s awesome game play and somewhat familiar combat!

First off, yes Kuon does have fixed camera angles and tank controls, and thankfully it uses said camera angles just as well as Fatal Frame does! Like, I was honestly surprised given that Fatal Frame has really been the only series I’ve personally played that uses its fixed camera angles to enhance the horror over it just being a technical limitation of the time.

In case you missed it, in my Fatal Frame II post I talked about how that series used its fixed camera angles to help scare the player by shifting their perspective to show them something they might have missed. And I don’t mean that in a jump scare kind of way but rather putting something just in the corner of the screen, something you can easily miss. And Kuon does this as well! Often times when it does it’ll have said scary thing move and quickly get out of the frame, adding that much more to the unease of walking around this manor as you’re left wondering if that was just a quick scare or if you’ll need to actually watch out for whatever it is you might have just seen! It’s this sort of thing that really makes me miss fixed camera angles…

Beyond the camera angles though, you’ll be doing the usual survival horror things as you run around the manor! Fighting monsters, collecting items, solving puzzles, and finding little hints here and there about what’s really going on in the Fujiwara Manor! And Kuon does all of these things super well! Though some of the puzzles are a bit out there. One literally requires you to know things about the Chinese Zodiac and the hint for this puzzle weirdly makes it harder to understand? Thankfully you can actually pretty easily brute force your way through that particular puzzle and most don’t come anywhere close to being that cryptic. The rest of the puzzles also aren’t too challenging, but at the same time I still found them satisfying at the very least!

Moving on from puzzles though, let’s talk about that combat! As it might be a bit familiar to a few people.

The combat in Kuon, like most survival horror games, is pretty clunky! Partly due to the camera angles but most likely to give the game some tension. There are basically two ways of attacking, melee and using spells. Your melee option actually depends on which character you’re playing as too! Utsuki gets a knife while Sakuya gets a fan. They aren’t too different honestly but they do have different animations. Utsuki, as you probably guessed, just does some stabs and slashes while Sakuya basically does a dance when attacking with the fan. Said dance is honestly pretty hard to hit enemies with so I found the fan way less useful than the knife! However, you’re not really suppose to use either options unless you’re trying to save your spells for a bigger threat than the usual demons running around.

Unlike Resident Evil or Silent Hill where you’ll be conserving ammo for your guns, or Fatal Frame where you’ll be conserving film for your camera, in Kuon you’ll be saving up specific spells! You can equip two spells at a time, and if you don’t have a spell equipped in one of the slots you’ll melee attack instead, with these spells varying pretty wildly! Some will do pretty straight forward things, like the fire ball spell you’ll be finding the most. It’s the weakest spell seemingly and, as you guessed, just fires a ball of fire forward! Beyond that though you’ll be getting stronger spells like ones that fire multiple fire balls, one that impales your enemy with shards of ice freezing them in place, and ones that summon creatures to help you! These creature ones also vary a lot from sending out a single spider to summoning some big buff demons to wreck your enemies for you. However, you only have a limited number of each of the spells, with the stronger ones being more rare to find, as you probably guessed. And this system of basically running out of spells rather than the spells drawing from a magic meter is oddly similar to what would be used in the original Dark Souls! It honestly feels super similar to that which makes me wonder if FromSoft took inspiration from Kuon when coming up with how spells would work in Dark Souls… I mean, probably not, but it’s still a fun thought!

Now you’re probably wondering what you’ll be using these spells on given that you aren’t fighting zombies or anything. Well, Kuon has you up against some demons and ghosts and a few other creatures! There sadly isn’t a ton of enemy variety, another common thing for survival horror games of this era, but they do their job well enough! You’ll also be tackling a handful of boss fights as well but just like with most of the enemy encounters, these are kind of forgettable. The two I do remember though would easily be the fight against the big monkey enemy, the only fight I ever really struggled with, and the final boss fight of the game which was honestly a pretty rad fight! I certainly can’t say this game has any iconic enemies that stuck with me, but that isn’t exactly a bad thing when I feel the rest of the game carries it well enough. Especially when it comes to the mystery of the story!

The story itself is really what kept me going through the game, more so than either of the other two games I spoke about this month, as I found it to be so unique and well presented. It even includes a pretty great twist towards the end of one of the phases! Speaking of that, if you want to get the full experience of the game you will need to play through both Yin and Yang phases but thankfully this isn’t a big ask. The game is actually pretty short with each phase only taking about 4 or 5 hours. Which ever phase you do second will of course be faster too since you’ll know a lot of the many puzzles and how to get around them. This very clearly takes inspiration from Resident Evil 2 where that game also tasks you with playing two different versions of the same game for the full experience. Sadly, Kuon doesn’t change the phases depending on which one you do first like RE2 does when it comes to which character you play first in that game, but going through both is very much worth it! I don’t want to spoil anything but trust me, you’ll want to see both through to the end.

In the end, Kuon is very much carried by its setting and story. Beyond that I can see a lot of people just kind of brushing this game off as yet another classic survival horror game on the PS2. And while they aren’t exactly wrong when it comes to that assessment, I think anyone who does skip out on this game is missing out!

Not only are the story and setting super unique, the rest of the game is rock solid with it not doing anything particularly bad. The game was clearly over looked when it originally released, not seeing many copies being printed out and making it extremely hard to get your hands on today, especially since FromSoft certainly hasn’t acknowledged this game and probably never will. Unlike with Haunting Ground, Kuon really doesn’t have much of a cult following behind it. It was enjoyed enough to thankfully have a great emulated version of the game, but this game has never seen any form of port or remaster. Even Haunting Ground got a port exclusively on the Japanese PS3 digital store!

This is honestly the main reason why I wanted to highlight Kuon in particular and had it be the final game I talked about this month. I think it can be enjoyed much more now than it was on release. Not only are survival horror games like this much less common but I feel like a lot more people would get a kick out of the Japanese folklore inspired story than players back in 2004. If you had to play only one of the games I recommend this month I’d probably say check out Kuon but you really can’t go wrong with any of the three games I talked about!

And you should play all of them honestly! Even if you need to go through the effort of setting up an emulator. And I know I’m probably sounding like a broken record at this point but once again you should not feel bad about doing that for these games. These three games are very much lost to time. I feel like Fatal Frame II might be the only one that could see a port or remaster or remake of some kind but even that’s a long shot. As for Haunting Ground and especially Kuon, these two will probably never be brought up again. While Capcom seems aware of the cult following Haunting Ground has, Kuon has not been recognized by FromSoft at all! And I can’t really blame them for that either, it didn’t do particularly well when it released and it’s barely got a cult following now. As such, the only way to play these games is through emulating unless you’re willing to drop literally hundreds of dollars to play them! And while I’ll praise all of these games lots and lots of times, no game is worth that much… So do yourself a favor and set up that emulator so you can finally experience some amazing classic games!

And with that, we’re done with Spooky Month this year! I hope everyone enjoyed hearing about these niche older titles as much as I enjoyed playing them. All of these games were ones I have been wanting to play and talk about since even before starting this blog so hopefully I was able to do them justice and convince a few of you to pick them up yourself! Setting up an emulator can be a hassle but trust me, it is very much worth it.

Beyond that, I hope everyone has a happy and safe Halloween this year! Enjoy some candy and scary games. We’ll be back with some non horror topics on the blog soon enough as well so stay tuned for that and come back next year for another Spooky Month! See you then, everyone.