New Horror Game Set in Infamous Kowloon Walled City

Photos of the Kowloon Walled City often snuck into "are they real" galleries across the web. A dense nugget of windowless apartments, alleys and grime, a city condensed into what appears to be a sunless, hopeless plaza. It was real, though demolished by 1994. Originally walled up in the Qing dynasty to limit British influence, squatters blossomed the small space after Japan retreated from their occupation in WW2, China's reclamation making it seem like a safer place to live. As the city transformed into a cyberpunk nightmare, neither the Chinese nor British government wanted to take responsibility for this runaway hotbed of brothels and drug dens. Sounding too literary to be true, modest citizens of the city fended for themselves in tight knit community groups, and the best life could be found on the top floors, with access to the rooftops and fresh air. It has inspired everything from Batman Begins to Shadowrun, but outside of Bloodsport it's astounding more movies and games haven't been set there. Especially horror.

In Phantasmal, a new first-person horror game, you venture into Kowloon Walled City on the verge of its demolition, looking for an aunt who established a drug clinic to help with the city's addicts. Upon exploring her apartment, you fall through the floor, a kind of rabbit hole into the city's countless layers. It doesn't take long to discover that not only are the remaining denizens acting unusual, but the darkest depths are infested with grotesque demons, their origins found somewhere between a new mysterious narcotic in circulation and something far more occult.

Phantasmal is a procedurally generated horror game, which means that the world is randomly generated and no two levels will ever be identical, even upon replaying. This has worked well with games like Monstrum, where you are stalked across a cargo vessel, but makes even more sense for a place as derelict, delirious, and labyrinthian as Kowloon Walled City. That said, while the environments are stuffy, they don't make the greatest sell. For what was once considered the densest city on Earth, the world doesn't look very lived in, rooms feeling more like storage closets or extremely littered parking garages. I also struggled to believe how there can be so many rumbles and flashes of lightning in a world that is simultaneously supposed to be windowless.

The flaws aren't strictly aesthetical. Picking up items is frustratingly fickle, and enemies usually pop up in swarms. Phantasmal, wanting to be a stealth-based game, encourages sneaking through the pits with strategic uses of light, but eight times out of ten the monsters are just waiting immediately on the other side of the door. The great thing about most "roguelikes" is how frequent deaths feel like part of a larger learning curve, and while a salesman operating off a fold-in table in the first apartment lets you increasingly stock up for every quest, it doesn't feel like I'm learning more about the mechanics of the game, other than shoot the enemies good-er.

Even if it already spent some time in Steam's Early Access, a lot of these issues could still be ironed out. In any scenario, the setting of Kowloon Walled City is worth revisiting, a place that was genuinely stranger than fiction.