Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Kwaidan ~Azuma manor story~

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  8 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 142024
 

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.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Marginalia

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  9 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 092024
 

The next spooky game I decided to play is a short horror game called Marginalia, and after my mixed feelings about Monday’s game you can imagine my horror when the game began by a parked car on a desolate road.

But despite that immediate sense of similarity, it doesn’t have much in common with Desolate Roads at all.

Marginalia is walking sim in its purest form. Although I’ve tagged it as an adventure game here, there are no puzzles or items you need to interact with, nothing but walking in search of the next landmark. Moreover, the story is narrated to you, which makes it feel more like a short story using a game format to build atmosphere.

Fortunately, the story is interesting enough that it works. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it has enough of a hook – a man vanishing in search of a mysterious place called Kestlebrook, and the narrator’s search for him while learning about Kestlebrook from his notes – that I wanted to continue on to hear each new part.

Unfortunately, the world is too big for this sort of experience to feel rewarding. Everything more or less looks the same, so if you get off track, it’s difficult to orient yourself. The major landmarks are lampposts that you can see from a distance, but once you reach one, it can be a while before you see the next – enough that if you get going in the wrong direction by mistake, you could be wandering for a long time.

(It happened to me. I missed the direction I was supposed to head in and walked for about ten minutes with nothing happening before I decided to restart. This is another one of those games with no saves.)

There are also secret landmarks that add an additional layer to the story, but the nature of the map makes exploration feel so unrewarding that I didn’t feel it was worth seeking them out, as much as I would have wanted to.

Marginalia is a short game that takes under an hour to complete, and even if there isn’t much interaction, it’s a nice little horror story that I enjoyed. However, a smaller game world with clearer landmarks would have gone a long way toward making it a more enjoyable experience.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  12 Responses »  Tagged with: , , ,
Oct 042024
 

It had to come up, right?

Back when Emio was first teased, most of us thought it would be a new horror game from Nintendo.

It turned out to actually be a dark new entry in the Famicom Detective Club series, which was a pleasant surprise to me after I’d played the Famicom Detective Club remakes just this past May and wished the series would continue.

We discussed it a few times leading up to launch, but not since the full game has come out. So let’s talk about Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club.

I would not actually call Emio a horror game or even a horror visual novel, despite the expectations when it was first teased. It’s very much a mystery, albeit one with dark and disturbing elements, and I’d even say most of it has less tension than the first two games in the series. However, when I say most of it, that’s very important to why we’re still talking about it today.

Now, I wrote a full review of Emio over at MonsterVine, so be sure to check that out for my thoughts on the game as a whole.

Instead of repeating all my thoughts here, I’ll just say that I definitely recommend Emio as long as you don’t mind a strangely-paced story that feels like it saves almost everything for the very end. That end does make it worthwhile, but it left me wishing some of the reveals had been woven through the earlier parts of the game too. Meanwhile, as I’d hoped from the demo, the new function of the “think” command to give a hint means you’re much less likely to get caught in a loop of trying every action without knowing what to do, so it feels like the most player-friendly game in the series. There are also a lot of fun optional scenes, like I mentioned in my review.

Getting back to the matter of Emio as a horror game and the fact that most of it is not, that ties into my comment on the unusual pacing. The final segment of Emio gets much darker, delves into some very disturbing scenes, and earns its M rating right there.

I would say the final part of Emio is basically a short horror story in its own right.

I have a theory about why they handled the game this way – that last part is so much darker than the rest of the series that I think they wanted to keep the bulk of the game more in line with the previous ones – but it does make it an odd experience.

In short, Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is a great choice to play in October, but mainly for the payoff at the end.

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