Operation Backlog Completion 2024
Oct 262022
 

For today’s review, I decided to turn to another short horror game that’s been in my backlog for a while: Bonbon.

Bonbon is a short adventure game from the perspective of a child. The gameplay mainly consists of simple tasks, like carefully carrying your toys to a box and putting them inside.

And dealing with the giant rat called Bonbon.

It’s a short game that lasts roughly half an hour or so, and while it’s pretty simple, it has an unsettling atmosphere and a few scary moments.

However, I found the story to be a little too ambiguous.

Click for Bonbon spoilers
The store page says the subtext is about child abuse, except it doesn’t really give many clues about what’s really going on aside from a creepy fairy tale – and the fact that if you’re playing a horror game about a child and there’s a giant ambiguous monster causing trouble, being a metaphor for abuse is a reasonable guess. My problem is that those sorts of stories usually have a context where you can take the implied meaning and say, “Oh, so that scene was actually…” but I can’t figure out how to do that here.

If I were left to my own interpretation, I’d probably say it’s about mundane things coming across as scary through a child’s eyes, but it feels like it’s missing something.

Nevertheless, while I might not be entirely sold on Bonbon’s story, I can’t deny that it was a creepy game to play, with good audio designs and a lot of little moments that kept me on edge.

  2 Responses to “Celebrating All Things Spooky: Bonbon”

  1. I have mixed thoughts and feelings about this type of horror game. It kind of takes the fun/mystery away when you can rationalize the horror as something. Especially from the perspective of a child and it being something mundane. Most horror games lose the magic after the first playthrough but finding out the scary thing chasing you is just your ugly aunt, is even more disillusioning.

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