Operation Backlog Completion 2026

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: Immure (Part 1)

 Video games  8 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 152025
 

A few years ago, I picked up a bundle on itch.io that included a horror game called Immure.

Immure is a side-scrolling horror game about a man who finds himself trapped in a strange mansion. After seeing a glimpse of his past, his exploration takes him into another space entirely – an apartment building where a monster roams the halls.

You’ll find items you need to use to get past obstacles and unlock doors, notes that shed light on the events that happened before the game, and places to hide from the monsters. In addition to hiding, you can stop monsters temporarily by shooting them.

There’s another mechanic as well, a mysterious crystal that acts as your light but can also be used to reveal secrets.

What really stood out to me is that you can choose whether to save or destroy the monsters by making use of the information you learn about them, which reminds me a bit of the Spirit Hunter series. I enjoyed it there, and I liked seeing it here, as well.

Now, after playing for about an hour, I finished the apartment section and returned to the mansion, and that’s when I learned that what I actually got in the bundle was Immure Part 1.

Part 2 is only available on Steam, as DLC for the first part, but since Part 1 is free on Steam, I could download it and buy Part 2. However, it seems the remaining parts will probably never be developed, so even playing Part 2 will leave me with an incomplete experience. It’s a shame to see that it didn’t work out, especially since the game seems so promising!

I might still get Part 2 one of these days, but in the meantime, the first part of Immure is an enjoyable horror game worth taking a look at if you don’t mind knowing its mysteries may remain unresolved.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: ZENO

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Video games  9 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 132025
 

Earlier this year, I learned about a short horror game called ZENO, so I decided to play it this October!

(I mistakenly thought it was an RPG because of the way it’s described, but it’s really more of a horror adventure game. It was just made with RPG Maker.)

Two young men wake up together in a mysterious facility, with no memory of who they are or how they got there. The door is locked and won’t open until they’ve been handcuffed to each other, after which point they leave and find files telling them who they are – and one of them is a genius psychiatrist while the other is a homicidal maniac.

They have to work together to get out by solving puzzles to unlock each new floor of the facility.

There are threats in the facility, as well, so from time to time you’ll be chased and need to run from screen to screen until you lose your pursuer.

While not excessively dark, the story deals with horror themes like murder and cannibalism. It has some interesting twists and quite a few endings. After I finished the game with the normal endings, I used a guide to get the true ending (although there are still several endings I didn’t seek out).

My one criticism of Zeno was going to be the English translation, since a lot of lines were awkward or used abbreviations (“sth” for “something” was a common one, but a character responding to a very serious revelation with “I C” made me laugh out loud), but after finishing it I learned that in the time since I downloaded it, a newly proofread version was made available. That’ll teach me not to download a game months ahead of time and not check the page again before playing it! I haven’t tried the proofread version, but it should be an improvement.

Anyway, ZENO is an enjoyable short horror game that I was already going to recommend playing despite the translation issues, so now I’m even more confident in my recommendation. It seems there are also some side games, so I may check those out sometime as well.

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