The story campaign is pretty short, and you’ll run out of plot long before you run out of collectibles, secret events, and special spirits to encounter. Seriously, don’t try to rush through this game. Go slow, get a feel for your surroundings, and don’t worry too much about rushing through things. You even have fast travel markers to quickly get back to where you left off, so other than a few Vita-chuckingly frustrating moments late in the story, it’s almost worth it to die in order to get a particular item or to feel out a monster-puzzle that’s blocking the way. This should, in theory, give Yomawari a stealthy lemon twist, but the stealth mechanics don’t add up to much in practice, since you can get through most of the game just running away from everything.īesides, dying doesn’t give you a game over it just sends you (with all the items you’ve collected thus far) back to your current checkpoint.
If you run too much, you get tired, and around enemy spirits, you get tired far quicker than you would while in safer pastures. Being a little girl, you can only do so much, and you can sneak, hide, run, and throw objects at enemies to distract, escape, or harm them.
They (all beautifully designed and unique) will weave to and fro along the streets, some only glimpsed in the light from street lamps or your flashlight, and others in plain sight, ready to dive at you when you get too close. In this case, it’s the town’s spirit population. Of course, if there’s a town, there has to be someone in it. A Let’s play would not do Yomawari justice. Without a doubt, this is a game meant to be played, rather than watched on Youtube. The town looks, sounds, and feels like a real town, and if you wrap your blanket around yourself, huddle in a dark room with the Vita’s sound cranked up, you may feel like you’re being drawn into it yourself. Streetlights will flicker, electrical objects will buzz when it you get close, and your footsteps may sound almost too loud against the deafening silence of the city streets. You can dig through trash cans, rifle through peoples’ mail, and even shine your flashlight at the ground and pilfer 10 yen coins to offer to the various jizo statues around town. There is a story campaign, but it’s subtle enough to be open to interpretation, and mostly serves to open up the various areas, as well as give you access to the post-game content. Specifically, your goal is to explore your entire town, searching for the whereabouts of your wayward dog and older sister. I’d almost call it a sister game to Corpse Party, but where the latter was a story-heavy experience with exploration almost serving as a means to tie the events together, Yomawari takes the opposite approach, emphasizing exploration and discovery over drawn-out stories and characters. The staples of the genre (such as one-hit deaths, trial-and-error gameplay, and enemy placements that count as puzzles in their own right) are there in the design, for better and for worse. See, when you get down to it, Yomawari: Night Alone is what happens when a AAA studio gives games like The Witch’s House or Ib a much-needed modern facelift, with high-quality graphics, crisp sound, and an engine that isn’t held back by the limitations of RPG Maker.
#YOMAWARI NIGHT ALONE ENEMIES SOFTWARE#
Thankfully, Nippon-Ichi Software delivered, with Yomawari: Night Alone, a hauntingly beautiful game that is just as charming as it is brutal. It doesn’t help that after my disappointment last year with Corpse Party: B lood Drive (though you can see what one of my compatriots thought of it here) I was chomping at the bit for some good J-Horror, especially in time for Halloween.
It’d explain my fascination with the Twilight Syndrome series, at any rate. Maybe it’s in how it’s unashamedly steeped with Japanese culture and religious traditions, standing in direct contrast to mainstream American horror’s shy avoidance of its own origins maybe it’s the tension and atmosphere, pressing down on the player and suffocating them when done right, and eliciting more than a few giggles when done horribly or maybe I’m just a sucker for playing as really stupid schoolgirls running around in some derelict location after hours.
Jokes aside, I’ve never quite been able to shake myself of the J-horror genre, even when I started writing about import games on a barely-updated blog around six years ago.
#YOMAWARI NIGHT ALONE ENEMIES FREE#
Feel free to hold back your thunderous excitement. Oh man, Jennifer’s reviewing another Japanese Horror game? I know, it’s shocking.