well, writing game reviews was supposed to give me short critical writing exercises, but so far that’s only worked for LIMBO, which was a fairly middling experience. when i really like a game i end up with a lot more to say about it (INSIDE), and as evidenced by this game, i also have a lot to say when i really don’t like it. i have spent longer writing this review of Kairo than i spent playing it. i guess it sucks in relatively novel ways though, and along with this it does have a fairly unique identity.
this is the first “not recommended” review i’ve left on Steam for a game that isn’t obviously broken / nonfunctional. while i believe Kairo’s creator earnestly tried to make something good and unique, it’s baffling to me that it’s generally reviewed well. i think it can be interesting because of that, and maybe even “honest”, but sadly i still don’t think it’s very good.after watching some any_austin videos on “Unremarkable and odd places” in video games (and some others, but that’s the relevant series here) following someone linking one on either Mastodon or cohost (idr which one), i had a hankering for like. “The Backrooms: The Video Game”, if it existed. but not the shitty ones i’ve seen on LP channels that are full of monsters and whatever, i don’t mean the horror SCP version of this concept, i just mean the liminal spaces by themselves. a walking simulator that’s just like, hey here are a bunch of weird spaces for you to just walk through and explore and maybe touch, and it’s just a quiet, pensive experience — the kind with a lot of emphasis on footstep sounds. rather than try to find out if the one developer i’d seen posting WIPs on cohost and Mastodon who was experimenting with all kinds of neat rendering stuff for their Backrooms‐themed game had turned that into a finished experience, or if something else in that vein based on that idea already exists, i took a look at my Steam library, saw this game which i thought was gonna be kinda like what i was wanting which i hadn’t played yet, and loaded it up on a whim.
sometimes, this is the kind of experience Kairo tries to be. it has several rooms which serve no functional purpose besides having doors to travel between, and so just give you some scenery to look at. unfortunately this is not terribly compelling on its own; it’s hard to enjoy just looking around at stuff in the game when the graphics are so primitive on both technical and stylistic levels (i understand that the game is inexpensive so it doesn’t have the advantage of sheer asset quantity, but better decisions were still possible in other areas).
rectangles with flat, grey textures are accentuated only by coloured lighting and fog, basic SSAO (which falls off at a distance smaller than many rooms are large, which can cause odd artefacting when moving), an optional and subpar depth‐of‐field effect, and an optional subtle “grain effect” on the whole screen. most lighting looks to be either simple points or prebaked, yet there are still noticeable lighting glitches on geometry every now and then. the most technically impressive visual effects are when you get to see some dynamic shadows from moving objects, however infrequently this happens (not all moving objects will even cast shadows).
the depictions of abstract brutalist architecture lose their novelty pretty quickly — after seeing enough rooms full of concrete textures floating in coloured voids it feels like you’ve seen them all. Kairo makes a passable effort to mix things up from room to room within this strict framework, but there’s only so much that can be done to make things feel less same‐y without breaking free from those self‐imposed limitations. branching out from the main aesthetic premise in any way, like having some actual skies beyond the abstract starry background used in a couple rooms, could’ve gone a long way. aesthetically, this game peaks in its second room, which has a clumsily‐faked volumetric lighting effect made of a single triangle and is one of only a couple rooms to have random dust particles floating in the air.
most other factors that would contribute to a more immersive experience are also lacking; it’s quite clear in this game that you’re just controlling a Shape rather than a person with how collisions work, how the camera never bobs or moves unless the mouse moves, and how the footstep sounds are always the same and always play at the same pace no matter how quickly you’re moving. in that vein, the sound design tends to be fairly barren in general, with little in terms of environmental sounds that aren’t either some form of noise or one of a few bell sounds (used for interactive elements). giant concrete structures will fly through the air without so much as a “woosh” of air, and some other slabs of concrete that either move as doors or are pushed as blocks will play their movement sounds in a glitchy, stuttering manner.
the soundtrack (when applicable — some areas only get wind sounds or silence) is ambient, but consistently in an eerie way rather than a calming one (aside from perhaps one particularly repetitive track). the few setpieces that have custom audio accents feature harsh static, which is often accompanied by visual static (itself especially unpleasant because of how it’s implemented as a fast‐scrolling noise texture, creating a lot of trackable motion at high frame rates). essentially, no aspect of the environment feels as though it’s designed to make you want to be there.
the environments definitely did not need to be this way; brutalist architecture can and does have its own flavour of beauty. i do think Kairo acknowledges this to some extent, but on the whole i would say it’s consciously chosen to portray brutalism as a horror to escape (which the game’s ending strongly reinforces). this disappointing reality certainly made Kairo less enjoyable for me. it’s not like there’s any shortage of examples out there of surreal liminal spaces where they feel oddly inviting despite their complete lack of utility (Jared Pike’s Dream Pools are probably one of the most well‐known).
i wouldn’t say that this kind of environmental design is strictly “wrong” or anything of the sort however. that is not, by itself, why i give Kairo a negative review. (rather, it was possible that enjoyable environmental design could’ve been a “saving grace” that kept me from reviewing the game negatively.) but i will say it does not intersect kindly with the game’s other defining trait. when the environment’s nature already feels so unfriendly, it does not make the experience any more welcoming to also compound adversarial mechanics on top of that.
as mentioned before, a walking simulator is only what Kairo tries to be sometimes. the rest of the time it is, regrettably, a puzzle game. i was pretty sure going into it that Kairo would be puzzly, since i recall that i’d heard someone (poorly) describe it as something like “brutalist Myst” before. unfortunately i think it’s worse‐off for having the puzzles, mostly because they’re not very good in any way. Kairo’s puzzles tend much more towards “screenshot some symbols to hit some matching buttons later” than good puzzles. or they’re not even puzzles at all — some are literally forced trial and error, like one of the earlier ones that’s just “get to the middle of this annoying maze”. one “puzzle” is even completely random chance, and another is transparently an execution test (technically making Kairo an “action” game, hot take).
now, if none of those sounded like they were very difficult puzzles, it’s because they’re not. with almost every puzzle in Kairo, as soon as you realize what your goal is and what tools you have been given to achieve it, there’s really no puzzle left; sometimes you don’t even figure those out until after you’ve completed the puzzle, or maybe you’ll never figure them out! this misses the mark of what i would say a solidly‐constructed puzzle is, where you have all the tools laid out clearly in front of you and what you have to puzzle out is how to fit them together. Kairo is instead more similar to how i’ve seen IQ tests described before: you kinda just have to guess what the designer was thinking.
nothing embodies this problem more than one specific puzzle, which simply has to be discussed in a review because it very nearly made me quit playing this game without beating it. i will not spoil it, but if you have played Kairo yourself, it is the one with the 2 rotating dials. hell, if your memory of your playthrough is fresh enough you probably didn’t even need me to be any more specific than “That One Puzzle” because you instantly know the one, and you did not solve it yourself. you had to look it up. and when you looked it up, you might also have found a Reddit thread in /r/puzzlevideogames (spoilers at the link) discussing it, where the OP says “I cannot figure out what the logic is behind solving this puzzle, and I haven't found anyone online who knows what the logic is either.” and then after solving the puzzle themselves, they call part of it “bad puzzle making.”
bad design isn’t even the only thing that’s bad about the puzzle though. for one, it’s just way, way harder than anything else in the entire game in a totally unreasonable way. but also, the hint system almost certainly did not help you solve this puzzle, because it is a bad hint system. for some puzzles, the final hint explicitly tells you the solution to the puzzle so you can continue progressing, yet for others it fails to do this. the hints for this puzzle fall into the latter category, even though i think Kairo thinks they fall into the former? it’s a major inconsistency, and not the only such major inconsistency this game has either.
for instance, there are a variety of pure red herrings, which are not fun in a puzzle game. some rooms have interactive elements but are not actually puzzles, just boring things to play with. except actually they are puzzles?? which makes sense because they usually look more like puzzles than toys, despite the goal being even more poorly defined than usual. i think they tie in to one or more additional endings, which i absolutely will not be assed to try and figure out (the OP in the earlier Reddit thread described the solution to one as “some obscure bullshit”, which is not encouraging.) each hub area gets its own “toy room” like this though, so this does technically end up as a fairly concrete rule of sorts at least, which is evidently more than can be said for some other mechanics: i was stuck wandering the last hub for some time before i realized that one very simple and well‐established rule had actually been fully broken without the game telling me. after figuring that out by accident, i proceeded to immediately get stuck on a puzzle before realizing a different rule had also been just thrown out (and had i known this i wouldn’t have resorted to using hints here; this was the only time besides the aforementioned dials puzzle that i ended up using them).
this is the closest Kairo gets to having any sort of difficulty curve, where it artificially makes things more difficult to figure out towards the end of the main progression. the game’s actual “hardest” puzzle (as discussed earlier) is somewhere around the middle. this kind of inconsistency truly permeates every aspect of Kairo, culminating in a product with very little cohesion. the lack of common threads, themes, or mechanics between puzzles makes them feel like a random smattering of random ideas against the wall. the game’s principle creator has basically stated as much, if you ask me: “I work like this a lot. I don’t spend a lot of time planning.”
this extends to the game’s “narrative” as well, which is abject nonsense. the world occasionally features random pictures of things that, how to say, feel like stereotypically Western ideas of what “smart things” are, or are perhaps meant to be symbols of “the illuminati”? a DNA helix, Albert Einstein, a molecular diagram, a statue of Budai (possibly mistaken for the Buddha), a circuit diagram, the Vitruvian Man… to be blunt, i think Kairo is the first time i’ve seen a game try to look smarter than it actually is. there’s no way to discern any narrative meaning from these things; they are just total non sequiturs. none of this ever amounts to anything, and the game’s ending does not bring any of this together in any way. to quote Kairo’s principle creator again: “If I’ve done my job right, then as the ending sequence unfolds, players will understand how what they've done has gotten them there.” well, he has not done his job right. text could potentially have helped the player to better guess what the creator was thinking in this regard, but for some reason he was hell‐bent on not using text to tell a story… except for the one time that there’s literal English text in Kairo that tells part of the story. also, you can draw your own conclusions about the decision to associate the Chinese language with the concepts of disaster and ruin in an especially industrial environment coated in pure red fog which i would say is Kairo’s most hostile‐feeling room.
there are still multiple paragraphs left, so suffice to say my issues with Kairo don’t end there. there are several QoL issues too. one i can rarely excuse but which remains common in video games regardless is a lack of separate volume controls for music and sound effects. you can’t always see a map on the pause screen for some reason, and you’re never shown your progress on objectives other than briefly after completing one and in the hub. using a higher FoV (i believe the default is 60°, while i prefer 90°) will cause the camera to clip inside of any walls you’re up against. i softlocked within my first 30 minutes of playing by jumping onto some curious terrain which i was then unable to leave to get back in‐bounds, due in part to how out‐of‐bounds handling in this game works. (i was able to respawn at an entrance by quitting and reloading the game, at least.) also the game sometimes crashes when switching away and back to it when it is in fullscreen.
the game’s frame rate is clearly uncapped, but feels jerky despite this because player movement physics are still capped (probably at 60 Hz). you can move the camera around at high framerates thankfully, but i’m pretty sure you could theoretically beat this game without moving the camera, so it seems fully separated from the playsim. movement also just feels not great in general — there’s absolutely no feedback for running or jumping (again, not even in your footsteps), and there’s significantly less friction and more inertia than i’m expecting for a simple walking simulator. there’s also some physics jank with how you can’t step up onto higher surfaces if you don’t have enough speed. Kairo does support simultaneous Joystick+KBM control schemes, which is nice. not that it’s all that necessary; if your mouse has 3 buttons, you can easily play this game just using that. i really wish there was an “autorun” option, since with a joystick a separate speed control can be rendered redundant.
on that note, i will say that the best thing about Kairo is that it has run and jump buttons, even though the main path of progression does not actually require you to use either of those things. (i would say any classification of Kairo as a “puzzle platformer” is inaccurate as such.) the most fun i had playing this game was using running and jumping to move around more quickly and in unintended ways (even if this got me softlocked at one point, as mentioned before). frankly, with how massive the scale of the architecture reaches in this game, not having any interesting movement options would have made it thoroughly dreadful to trudge through. another design aspect related to controls, but which i feel unsure about, is that there is no “interact” button in the game at all. this keeps the controls simple and can remove some types of uncertainty on what exactly you can interact with, but it also reduces the amount of verbs the player has to interact with puzzles, which i think has resulted in a lot more running around than would otherwise be necessary and no interesting puzzles. ultimately i left the experience feeling unsure as to whether or not this is or can be a good design decision, and whether or not Kairo leveraged this design’s potential decently or poorly.
it’s just another one of several nuggets of ideas or inspiration present in Kairo that feel like they could’ve been fleshed out into something good and interesting, but which the game fails to realize in a way that does them any justice. rather than an unpolished gem — a product of an idea that forms one cohesive structure but didn’t have enough work done for its full potential beauty to end up on display — Kairo instead feels like a chunk of concrete with little pieces of crystal scattered within its volume, restricted from growing or forming one whole by a brutal lack of refinement. in the end, Kairo’s execution is just so unanimously poor that i could only come away from it feeling thoroughly underwhelmed and uninspired.
i can’t post this review on Steam because apparently there is an 8000 character limit on reviews, which this more than doubles. maybe i’ll just link to this post instead.
click here to show some supplementary observations which do contain spoilers.
i had to make the cover image of this post the fucking skeleton. i burst out laughing when i saw it. funniest goddamn shit, so completely inexplicable (nothing else like it exists in the whole game) and yet it’s presented totally seriously. the writing on the chair also makes the game fail to present its narrative without any text, as it claims to.
when i discuss the game breaking its own rules towards the end, i’m referring to these things specifically:
- entrances and exits have always had the same visually distinct appearance of a blurry screenshot of the next room against black and covered in wavy distortion, but the last hub area has 3 stone gates that visually are just like any other stone structure in the game with nothing making them stand out at all. despite this, there are loading zones under them. the last hub is also far and away the largest and most maze‐y, which means getting stuck here not knowing where to go to progress sucks.
- all the puzzles for the primary progression path are completely standalone, except for 3 puzzles in the last hub where you kind of need to do them in a specific order or else they won’t make any fucking sense.