Operation Backlog Completion 2025

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Asylum

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  7 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 292025
 

It’s been a long, long time since we first talked about Asylum.

I first mentioned Asylum back in 2013 in my review of Scratches, the previous game from the same developer.

Asylum was the first game I ever backed on Kickstarter, and after a twelve-year wait, it finally came out earlier this year. And as we approached the end of October, it suddenly occurred to me that I should play it for spooky month!

Set in the crumbling Hanwell Mental Institute, you play a man searching the asylum for answers so he can find out the meaning of his hallucinations by learning what happened to him when he was at the asylum years earlier. It has a haunting, ominous atmosphere as you make your way through the almost-abandoned halls.

It is a point-and-click adventure game, and that actually took me by surprise; even though I knew it was an adventure game, I expected to walk around in 3D.

But no! Just like Scratches, you’ll use the point-and-click interface for everything, including walking around a room. While having only a few set areas in each room you can walk to makes exploration take a little getting used to, I adjusted to it in time and found its gameplay approach almost nostalgic. As you explore, you’ll find documents to read, occasional puzzles to solve, and a handful of characters to talk to.

There are a few oddities. For example, I can’t help but wonder why interacting with the projector had a cutscene for getting out and putting away each film reel when most interactions just had item disappear and reappear as needed.

Nevertheless, it takes a little under 10 hours to complete, and I found it to be a satisfying experience. Although I enjoyed Scratches more due to the way its sense of horror and dread slowly builds up, Asylum still has a great sense of atmosphere, and I felt I really knew the location by the end. The ending seems controversial, and I did find it puzzling at first, but the more I think about it, the more content I am with it.

Now, having waited 12 years for it, I have to admit I had built it up to be bigger and grander in my mind, when it really feels more like… another game in line with Scratches.

But when I think back to how I felt when I played Scratches and what I’d have wanted from another game in that style, I’m happy with what I got in Asylum. It was a good choice to play this October.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Yuki

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  7 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 272025
 

The other day, I was on social media when I saw a post about a newly released free game called Yuki.

Yuki begins with you entering an abandoned school in search of your missing best friend. Spirits haunt its halls, but you press on and begin your search.

The game has an interesting 3D pixelated art style, with sliders in the options that let you change the level of pixelization. (I immediately cranked the text pixelization option all the way down because I found it unreadable on any higher setting.) In many ways, it mimics classic survival horror games, with items to find, puzzles to solve, and even an option for tank controls.

Facing enemies, however, is a different matter. Encountering a spirit initiates an unusual form of turn-based combat. On the enemy’s turn, they attack you with bullet hell projectiles in a style very similar to Undertale. On your turn, you must choose dialogue options to talk to the spirit.

It’s basically a test of how well you’ve paid attention to understand who the spirit is and what they want, because giving them wrong answers will prolong the battle and cause them to deliver deadlier attacks.

These encounters are few in number and all story-based, so ultimately I feel like Yuki is more of an adventure game than survival horror. It only takes a little over an hour to complete, making it a compact experience with some nice exploration and a decent enough story.

Oddly enough, a few aspects make it feel like it should have been part of a bigger game. For example, you find money a couple of times, but the only thing you can do with it is trade some of it for a hat.

Yuki is short and feels like it doesn’t quite meet its full potential, but it’s also free, so it’s worth taking a look. It’s one of those games where if the dev ever makes something longer, I’ll be interested in checking it out.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Rental

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  7 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 222025
 

Rental came to my attention as a free horror game described as “Animal Crossing x horror,” although I’d say the only reason it gets the Animal Crossing comparison is because the characters are cute anthropomorphic animals.

(On a side note, I’m amazed that looking up “rental horror game” actually worked to find it.)

You play Umi, whose family has just rented a cabin for vacation. Once she heads inside, however, she finds herself trapped, with no way to escape except by performing an exorcism.

The gameplay is simple and requires you to search the house for the items you need for the exorcism, with occasional spooky disturbances. I would have described it as a nice, mildly creepy game that only suffers from the camera being pulled in a little too close to the camera for this type of exploration, but then I encountered the maze.

Partway through, you have to navigate a mirror maze, and I got turned around and had so much trouble finding my way through that it soured my impression of the game.

Nevertheless, Rental is a decent spooky game that should take you about half an hour to complete, unless you get lost in the maze like I did, in which case it might take an hour instead.

 Older Entries