Yomawari: Night Alone

released on Oct 25, 2016

Yomawari is a Japanese horror action game and features a female protagonist that is searching for her older sister and pet dog, while exploring a creepy town at night. She only has a flashlight at her disposal, and using said flash light will let her “see things that shouldn’t be seen.”


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it's cool, but a bit of a pain to get through some sections ngl.

I prefer Midnight Shadows but Night Alone is still very fun. some of the sections/ collectibles are a bit annoying to get but they're certainly doable. I got all of the other achievements in 9 hours which makes the 50 hour playtime achievement a tad excessive. I'm not THAT bad... This was far nicer playing this on PC than on the tiny Vita screen I played it on originally, It really showcases the details in the artwork which is lovely

Continued by my review of the second game.

I'm genuinely conflicted by this game. On one hand it's a very nice "horror" game. Night Alone is beautiful with an incredibly well done sound design that carries the charm of a lonely walk through a town at night. It has light horror elements that are almost poetic and it really builds an atmosphere around that.

On the other hand, it tries too hard to do horror by throwing some unneeded screamers at you, some of the sounds being way too high and breaking the game's peaceful atmosphere and an absurdly frustrating difficulty at multiple points of the game.

The difficulty is really the biggest flaw of the game in my opinion. One of the things I really loved about the game at first is that it was not hard and felt very different from every horror game I've ever played. You walk around spirits and most of them are almost harmless, the remaining ones are like a puzzle and each of them have an appropriate way of being approached. You're not running, your life is not under a big threat, in many ways it reminded me of a movie like Spirited Away. It's also quite similar to Yume Nikki in the amount of weird and unique things you'll find through your adventure.

But aside from that, not only does the game throw more and more boring chase sequences at you but they're just absurdly difficult and require almost perfect timings (moving as soon as a cutscene is over, managing your stamina...) to survive. The checkpoint system contributes to making this frustrating especially late game. There's even a boss fight which feels completely out of place in a game like this.

I really wish the game had just stuck to the peaceful horror kind instead of trying more. Even the sole fact of walking in such a charming city at night makes it a one of a kind game because I've never seen any game replicate a feeling like this.

I think the game could have also benefited from being more open ended and less linear. Since we're just collecting trinkets through the entire game and there isn't really much of a narrative progression, such a structure would have been perfectly fitting and would have amplified the ingenuity of the design. But it still feels very nice to discover this small city and I really enjoyed that part.

Ultimately, the game doesn't seem to understand what it's good at and tries to appeal to generic concepts instead. Maybe it was riskier, but this game could have been great without being linear, without a "proper story" and without following horror tropes. This also raises a question: do all games that aim to be horror need to be scary? I think this game had a rather cool perspective of that and instead aimed at being spiritual more so than scary: you play a kid as if you were a cartoon's protagonist, there is no stress in regards to resource management (well except the salt, good luck finding salt) and dying isn't punished heavily. It could be an amazing, chill horror themed exploration game, but it's not.

The way my jaw dropped in the opening scene

I think I would enjoy this game if it didn't crash every 10 minutes ^_^ Maybe I'll watch a playthrough someday, if other people don't have the same issue.