Operation Backlog Completion 2025

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Chaos;Head

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  6 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Oct 082021
 

One of the visual novels I wanted to cover this October was Chaos;Child, after I heard it involves psychological horror. To be safe, I looked it up to double check that it’s fine to play Chaos;Child without playing the earlier, unlocalized Chaos;Head.

The general consensus was that you can, but it’s definitely not recommended.

So, yes. I bought a Japanese copy of Chaos;Head and used the fan translation in order to read it.

And… I’m glad I did!

Chaos;Head is a dark visual novel, much darker than Steins;Gate despite them belonging to the same series. The first few chapters in particular filled me with a great sense of paranoia and dread, and it has some of the most gruesome murders I’ve seen in any game.

The story follows a loner otaku named Takumi, who avoids people as much as possible, frequently suffers from delusions, and has felt an unknown gaze watching him ever since he was a child.

Now a twisted serial murder case has everyone’s attention in Shibuya, and Takumi finds himself caught up in it when an image showing the crime scene is sent to him a day before it happens.

I didn’t mind Takumi as a protagonist as much as some people do. While he’s certainly not the most noble character, I sympathized with his paranoia and extreme social anxiety.

Some of his delusions can be triggered by the player, when green and red indicators appear at the top of the screen at certain points in the story. Clicking the green one usually causes a positive or sexual delusion. Clicking the red one usually causes a horrific or cynical delusion. The line blurs a little as the game goes on, and there’s also the option of not clicking either delusion.

What I find even more interesting is its use of paranoia, though. Takumi is paranoid, there’s no doubt about it. Yet Chaos;Head piles up so many unsettling mysteries that the player becomes paranoid too.

There were points when I could clearly dismiss Takumi’s reactions as paranoia, but that just meant I felt I couldn’t necessarily trust him to be a reliable narrator any more than I could trust what other characters were saying. It does an excellent job of making the player mistrust everything and everyone.

Chaos;Head is a dark, fascinating story. The ending left me with several questions and a few apparent plot holes, but it sounds a lot is fixed by the updated re-released Chaos;Head Noah, which unfortunately doesn’t have a translation yet. I’m happy I read it, not just to improve my experience with Chaos;Child (and apparently Robotics;Notes also benefits from having read Chaos;Head), but because it’s a great visual novel in its own right.

Since Chaos;Head Noah is said to be a huge improvement, I look forward to the day when I can read that… although I can’t help but hope it will get an official translation someday.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Silver Falls Episode Prelude

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 062021
 

I first heard about the Silver Fall series when Silver Falls – 3 Down Stars was announced for the 3DS.

It looked fairly ambitious, and there weren’t a lot of 3DS games still being made. However, it was exclusive to the New Nintendo 3DS, so me and my original 3DS were out of luck.

So I was intrigued when I learned a new entry in the series was being made for the Switch, called Silver Falls Episode Prelude. I ended up winning it in a contest, so I decided to play it this October.

You play a deliveryman making a late-night delivery to a house that seems eerily abandoned, with notes that suggest something sinister has occurred. Episode Prelude is short, with its story mode taking under an hour to complete. Unfortunately, it’s also a little tedious.

The start of the game has the puzzle-solving elements of survival horror that I love. The house is locked and no one is answering, so you need to find a way inside by finding items to help you access other items, and so on.

However, this part of the game takes place in a wide open space with no threat, so it comes down to scouring the environment (first in the dark, then mercifully with a flashlight) for anything you can interact with. There is eventually a threat, although not as much of one as I expected for the number of items I was picking up.

The storyline in Episode Prelude is unclear, maybe because it’s a prelude. Aside from the ill-fated delivery, you spend some time talking to your boss, who is depressed about a vaguely-referenced incident, and later on you’re searching for him after a sudden transition.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I’d played the previous Silver Falls games, these characters and events might mean more to me.

What Silver Falls does do well is its atmosphere. Reading the notes in the first area to get a glimpse of the sinister events that unfolded there was one of the most interesting parts of the game, and there was a great moment later on where I looked up to see eerie green lights in the sky.

There’s also a battle mode, unlocked after you complete the story, which lets you fight waves of enemies. That might be a greater draw for some players.

Overall, Silver Falls Episode Prelude just wasn’t for me. It has some nice ideas, but it mainly just left me wondering if I’d enjoy the original game more.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Devotion

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  7 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 042021
 

What better way to begin this year’s Celebrating All Things Spooky reviews than with a horror game I’ve been dying to play?

Devotion is a first-person psychological horror game from Red Candle Games, who previously developed a horror game called Detention. I loved Detention, so I was eagerly awaiting the launch of Devotion in 2019.

When it came out, I decided to wait until closer to October to buy it. That was a mistake.

Devotion was pulled from Steam after images were discovered making jokes about the president of China, and it looked like it was never coming back. (You can read about the incident here.) Last year, I woke up one day to the exciting news that Devotion was being re-released on GOG, only for GOG to backtrack within hours due to “many messages from gamers.”

(Because GOG has never sold controversial games, right?)

But this year, at last, Red Candle Games began selling Devotion on their own website, and I immediately bought a copy to play this October.

Now that we’ve gone through the history of Devotion, let’s talk about the game itself. Devotion takes place in an apartment complex in Taiwan. In fact, most of it takes place in a single apartment, with the main character visiting and revisiting the same location seen at different points in time.

(Ironically, given the controversy, its story is not nearly as political as Detention’s. It’s really a personal tale.)

Devotion makes great use of the trick where you enter an area and the environment behind you changes when you turn around or leave the room, and the early parts in particular have a dread-filled atmosphere and some well-placed jump scares.

As you get further into the game, it becomes more focused on the personal horror and tragedy surrounding the main character and his family. It’s less horror in terms of scaring the player, and more the horror of the story itself and what happened to the characters.

Early on, it is fairly linear, but the middle of the game opens up more with puzzles for you to solve by visiting the apartment at different points in time and taking items from one to another as you learn more about the family’s lives. I felt like the ending’s impact could have been stronger, but it was a good, disturbing journey to reach it.

I enjoyed Detention more overall, especially for its exploration and puzzles, but I appreciated Devotion and its haunting tale. I look forward to playing whatever Red Candle Games makes next.

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