Exorcisimulation
The Xmas season approaches, but for some of us, Halloween never ends. I’ve just finished (well, reached a grisly end within) the demo for Chiyo, a first-personhorrorgame from Nimbus Games, set in Edo era Japan, in which you are a plucky young mystic sent by the Tokugawa Shogunate’s Magical Arcane Division to investigate and cleanse a spooky abandoned mansion on the coast.
Much like the protagonist of fellow Japan-set exor-simulatorGhostwire: Tokyo, you have a brace of occult, gesture-based powers with which to explore and, hopefully, vanquish any lurking spirits, but so far, the only ones I’ve gotten access to are a funky finger torch, the ability to unseal cursed doors, and the ability to see glowing puzzle props through surfaces. I very much do not feel like an Edo era John Constantine. I don’t even feel like an Edo era Scooby Doo. I mean, at least he was good at running away: the titular Chiyo waddles about like she’s worried her trousers are about to fall down.
One of the early signs a horror game is doing an effective job, for me, is that I start closing all the doors behind me to thwart an ambush or simply, the sight of Something Unpleasant. Or leaving them open, because I don’t want to be faffing around withAmnesia-style object physics when I’m running away. Or standing there in paralysis, unable to decide whether to close or shut the doors and argh argh argh, what’s that banging in the ceiling?
The house itself is appealingly/oppressively wrought, with blood-spattered sliding shoji partitions, ornamental fans, rain battering the slates and candles not-quite-illuminating the ends of corridors. There are journal pages and the like to unearth that hint at tortuous family shenanigans, while also conferring puzzle hints. The intro narration properly hams it up, and the English localisation is a bit scruffy, but it’s nothing deal-breaking.
Playing Chiyo left me curious about the developer’s previous game Malice, which, it turns out, is the sorry recipient ofan Overwhelmingly Negative user consensus on Steam, at the time of writing. Mind you, it appears that a sizeable portion of that reaction has to do with it being a mandatory co-op game that was/is prone to disconnects - Chiyo is single player only. There’s also a sharp split between the English language reviews, which are Mostly Positive, and the rest.
