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.