For our next spooky game, let’s face off against more yokai – excuse me, Yoki – this time in a survival horror game.
Kwaidan ~Azuma manor story~ is inspired by the classics, complete with fixed camera angles and the option to play with either tank controls or modern controls.
I played the Switch version, although it’s on PS4 and PC as well.
You play a young woman training to be a Hoshoshi, someone who drives off evil spirits. When she and her mentor learn Azuma Manor has been overtaken by Yoki (why they didn’t call them yokai remains a mystery to me), they head in to handle the problem.
Now, Kwaidan has one weird quirk, which is its inclusion of point-and-click adventure controls. For the most part, you run around and fight enemies like you would in any game with 3D exploration, but when you want to interact with something in the environment or your inventory, you have to hover over it with a cursor first instead of just pressing a button. This is unnecessarily awkward, particularly since you need to be right by an object to interact with it anyway.
Your inventory also remains on-screen at all times, and you use the cursor to interact with it as well. While you have a limited inventory, resource management never really comes into play.
Combat in Kwaidan is a bit unusual for the genre. You have three weapons, one to attack right in front of you, one to attack enemies low to the ground, and one to attack enemies in the air. The latter two consume energy, which you can build up again by defeating enemies or defending against attacks. This makes it tilt slightly more toward action, a bit closer to Onimusha than Resident Evil.
Enemies respawn, which I found annoying at first, until I realized it’s almost a necessity because of the small game world. While it has the usual sorts of item-based puzzles I love from this genre, with backtracking requires to unlock doors and solve puzzles once you find the key items, it’s pretty small-scale. If enemies didn’t respawn, you’d soon spend most of your time in safety.
Most of the puzzles are straightforward, although one requires you to run around the manor to to look at spots in a first-person view to work out a code told to you in a document in a completely different location, which felt tedious. I would have preferred to have that information recorded in memos.
But my bigger criticism is that you only have one save slot. As such, if you save yourself into a situation where you really could use more healing items, you’d need to either start over or try repeatedly until you manage to scrape through.
Overall, the occasional frustrations in Kwaidan ~Azuma manor story~ weren’t enough to stop me from enjoying the game. The developer’s next game is about luring devils up a railway to seal them away, which sounds significantly different, but I’ll be interested in seeing what it’s like.
Damn, only one save slot? That’s the scariest part of a game like this! The true horror, the lack of ability to save in multiple slots to back out of mistakes!
Haha, yes. In a genre where multiple save files are usually common!
How often did you find yourself fighting enemies vs just running past them, if they simply respawn later? I feel like I wouldn’t bother with the fighting unless necessary after awhile.
In the outside area, which was more open, I started running past enemies when I had to cross through. But in more narrow spaces, I usually fought since that felt like the safer option.
Oh, Yokai! I feel like I don’t see enough japanese horror related things then I realize….wait yes there are. They seem to have a beautifully vast amount of mythos to dig from and I should really try playing one of them sometime. This one sounds neat.
Also thank goodness for the option for tank or modern controls. I don’t think I have enough old school Resident Evil experience for that to play nice :’)
Also random note: The one save file gave me flashbacks when I accidentally overridden my Xenoblade X save file because of the same reason….. sighhh.
This was definitely an interesting one. Fatal Frame would also be a good choice.
And RIP your save file, but on the other hand, boy do I have good news…
Fatal Frame 1-3 remaster when? 🙁
AND I cannot believed that just happend. I should complain about stuff more often!
And I hope this version has multiple save files, please and thank you.
Seriously, I don’t understand why they haven’t remastered them yet. They even remastered 4 and finally localized it. Making a remastered collection of the first three games feels like an obvious move… so where are they?