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. 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.

Feel free to hold back your thunderous excitement. Oh man, Jennifer’s reviewing another Japanese Horror game? I know, it’s shocking.

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