The promise of a cheap place to live leads to an hour of terror in Welcome to Kowloon

Fining somewhere to live is always a fraught affair no matter where you are. There are many things to consider, such as space, cost, location, and a whole lot more. Ultimately it’s a balancing act, in which you have to weight up one aspect with another before coming to a compromise. If you’re on a very tight budget, however, then things are undoubtedly harder, and that’s what leads to the events of Welcome to Kowloon, a short horror game that warns of the perils of cheap housing.

Now available on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S after its PC release way back in 2023, Welcome to Kowloon puts you in control of a young student seeking an inexpensive place to live. That leads him to an apartment block in Kowloon, where he’s secured himself a cheap room despite poverty and gang violence being rampant in the area.

Straight from the off, leaving your car and making your way to your room, it’s clear that it’s not a nice place to call home. The apartment block seems unkept and run-down, and its corridors are dark and narrow. Things go from bad to worse when you actually reach your room and find a strange message written on a note in a small room adjacent to it. It seems your new landlady might have a secret, one that will make you want to leave as quickly as you can.

And that’s what makes up the brunt of your playing time in Welcome to Kowloon: trying to get out of the apartment block with your life and sanity intact. Being just less than an hour long, it’s a brief endeavour with absolutely no time wasted, and while it’s not the most polished game available, it’s certainly unnerving.

You’ll explore the apartment, doing the things you usually do in horror games such as looking for keys and other items that will allow you to overcome obstacles in your path. But there’s no combat here, or the need to manage resources. This is the type of game where most encounters are designed to just make you jump out of your skin, though there is at least one chase section where if you’re caught it’s back to the last checkpoint to try again.

It’s not complex or particularly deep, then, but if you’re after a horror game you can enjoy playing from beginning to end in one session, which will probably have you on the edge of your seat foe the entire duration, Welcome to Kowloon is worth checking out. It’s rough around the edges, and you’ll probably want to turn off the obnoxious camera shake straight away, but for the price of a cinema ticket it does when it sets out to do: make you scream out loud and want to look away from the screen.

Welcome to Kowloon is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.