Every high-school has its own dark secrets. Well, maybe not every; but in Japan, this seems to be a rather popular theme. Mysterious disappearances, ghostly photographs, untimely deaths, eerie sounds coming out of the music room - all these things attract the curiosity of three high-school girls: Yukari, Mika, and Chisato. At night, armed with nothing but a flashlight, the trio of heroines enters the dark school building, prepared to explore every corner, and investigate every urban legend they have heard of... Tansaku-hen opens the Twilight Syndrome horror adventure series, defining its stylistic traits and gameplay. The game is divided into chapters, each dedicated to a particular "ghostly" story. Unlike most Japanese-style adventures, there is physical character navigation in the game; the player moves digitized images of the three girls on 2D backgrounds, in a manner somewhat similar to side-scrolling games - though many areas feature a third dimension, like in Western third-person perspective adventures. The gameplay consists of two activities only: walking and occasionally choosing a dialogue option and/or action, as prompted by the game's narrative. There is no other kind of interaction, no inventory, and no combat. Different choices may lead to different endings; the next chapter can be accessed only if the player has not attained the "bad" ending. Twilight Syndrome: Tansaku-hen abandons the nearly omnipresent anime/manga graphical style of Japanese games in favor of digitized images and photos of real people.
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Game is about ghost rumor hunting with the girls group that doesn't love mystery but have to because baka Mika is their friend and they don't want her to die just because she can't stop her curiosity, so rest of the game happens.
Unfortunately stories feels like a demo compared to the next one. Most of the ghost cases are super short and forgettable in my opinion, only case that memorable for me was the piano suicide one. Other than that it was just bunch of "let me tell you random horror stories on this Halloween night" kinda random. At least, I liked that they had multiple endings. But game ended on a really interesting cliffhanger and if I found this game in the ps1's prime days I would be pisseddddd I tell you
Sound design is really creepy and the amount of interactivity on offer is kept very ambiguous most of the time. Text crawl is relentlessly fast, and some dialogue choices seem to be on offer for only a short moment before becoming unavailable, so if you can't read Japanese about as fast as its spoken then you're gonna get familiar with your emulator's pause button.
The girls behave in a weirdly believable way, like even when they're investigating what is definitely a haunted area they still banter with each other sometimes.
I get the feeling that nothing in Kyuumei Hen is going to actually explain any of what's happened, it seems like the game's first priority is being atmospheric rather than telling a complete story.
At first I didn't like how open it is and how outdated it feels in conveying horror, but then looking online, I saw that it was based on rumors of ghosts IRL in Japan, which made it more interesting on an educational level.
The game uses scaled down photos + pixel art, but the ghosts are less pixelated photos of real people, but not sharp enough to realize it's a photo and I love it! it gives it an uncanny look that I adore but sadly failed to enjoy beyond that.
The stories are very simple and quick, and most of them could be summed up to 3 minutes instead of 2 hours and I still have 2 twilight syndromes to play, so I hope they're better qwq
My biggest problem with TST is that it's very simplistic! it drags its story a lot to barely tell anything, but from the cliffhanger of the ending, the next game is going to be much better and less simple since it's not going to be more mysteries in the school..? I hope?? idk
I spoiled myself to see what's up with the twilight syndrome and silver case relationship and yeah, I saw that it gets better in the future, but that's about it. TST really feels like a biiiiiiiig buildup that while I didn't enjoy as much as I wanted to, I hope it was worth it.