While debating about spooky games to play this October, I remembered Homicipher, which I’ve been curious about ever since it came out.

Homicipher is a horror otome game with an unusual twist – you’re lost in a world of monsters, and you can’t understand their language.

You can click words in the dialogue to type in what you think the meaning is, which means one of the game’s goals is to use context clues and other hints to slowly understand the dialogue. It’s actually pretty hard at times, and I finished all the endings with a lot of the words still not deciphered.

Now, when I started playing, I expected it to be exploration-focused like an adventure game, but it wasn’t really. Occasionally you have a few areas you can go between, but usually if you choose a path, you can’t go back.

Sometimes your choices lead to death, sometimes to an abrupt story ending (most of the endings felt a bit too sudden, actually), and sometimes to a more detailed route with its own endings. An ending list and scene select menu make it easy to revisit previous parts of the game to try different options.

I’ve described it as an otome, but I will say the romantic content is pretty light. It’s more based on implications and interpretation than anything else, and I could see platonic interpretations working just as well. There’s no direct romance.

At the same time, it isn’t as much of a visual novel as I expected, either. I suppose that comes with the language deciphering element; you can’t have a complex, text-heavy plot when everything is built around a language where the words encompass general concepts. A back-and-forth conversation where I’d only figured out a few words was interesting, but paragraphs like that might not work so well.

Still, it disappointed me a little that there wasn’t more story. I like my otome games to be heavy on either story or romance, and Homicipher is light on both.

This might sound like I disliked Homicipher, and there were quite a few points where I found myself thinking, “This isn’t clicking, it just doesn’t do it for me.” However, there’s one thing that makes me hesitant to say that, and that’s Mr. Crawling.

Mr. Crawling is the guy you see in the image above. He’s a monster who crawls around and has long black hair covering his face, and the main character runs from him when they first meet.

And he’s adorable.

Oh, he’s so cute. At first I was wary of him since it’s so easy to die in this game, but he really is so sweet that I started to feel more and more attached to him the longer I played.

I liked some of the other characters, too, and they had some interesting endings, but he really stood out the most for just being so cute.

And that brings me to my final thoughts on the game: it’s most worth it for its cute moments. It might seem strange to say that about a game with jump scares and blood and body horror and so many different ways to die, but given the lesser focus on plot and romance, I’d say the main reasons to play Homicipher are for the language-deciphering mechanic and for the cute moments with the characters… at least, when they aren’t trying to kill you.