This review contains spoilers
There's a persistent allure to seeking out hidden gems and games that may have been overlooked. Finding that diamond in the rough, something totally unexpectedly amazing, can recreate those feelings from back when you first started playing games and everything felt new and fresh and exciting.
...Iru! unfortunately is not one of those games. With a fan-translation released in 2021 there's hardly anything written about the game in English. Reviews from Japan back in 98 show that it wasn't a popular or well-received game in its home country either and it only takes playing it for a little while to understand why.
An adventure game at heart, Iru is built around wandering the halls of your character's high school after closing hours as you help your friend prepare for an upcoming festival. It starts out promising enough with an eerie atmosphere and those lovely low poly PS1 environments and characters. Sadly it doesn't take long before the game reveals its hand.
The gameplay consists entirely of walking back and forth between the same few halls and dozen rooms. Puzzles are straightforward and items are mostly easy to find, but progression is locked so tightly to following the precise, linear path the game sets for you and triggering cutscenes. The actual explorable space is so repetitive and you spend most of it just scouring these same rooms over and over, looking for whatever the next story event is that will allow you to progress.
Previously empty rooms will have new events or items appear in them randomly and only occasionally does the game see fit to give you any nudge to where you should look next. I'm not opposed to letting the player explore freely, but when you have such a small play area with so little new to see it stops being exploration and just starts to feel like you're creating a mental checklist of rooms and going down it after every single event. No sense of dread or curiosity the game tries to instill can survive this tedium.
It takes way too long for the playable space to expand beyond a single floor of the school and when it does you realize that every area is basically the same. If anything it makes the game even worse because now you have to keep checking even more areas for the path forward. There's never a change of scenery until the very end of the game.
Most of the time you can't actually die, save for a handful of scripted danger sequences in which you have to hide from enemies. These are very infrequent and its easy to survive them even without any foreknowledge they're coming. The game has a couple different routes and endings, but they vary incredibly little.
The story draws heavily on the Cthulhu Mythos, and when I say heavily I do mean heavily. Various monster names and grimoires and other such things are tossed at the player with such frequency and reckless abandon that it would make even the hackiest of pastiche horror writers blush. Sure I got a kick out of this the first few times, but it wasn't long before I was rolling my eyes at the unending namedrops. I do admit that it was neat to have this element of the game dropped on me since I didn't go in expecting it.
There is some intrigue early on in the actual plot, when you're unsure exactly what's going on and what the danger is, and I particularly enjoyed how examining the environments can sometimes reveal elements of the story before they would have appeared otherwise, but nothing ever comes of this. Even if you, personally manage to figure out what's going on early your character will remain a doofus for the sake of preserving the existing story. It was nice to see that as a horror story it really doesn't pull any punches in being quite brutal to the characters. Still, it's really not interesting enough to make it worth the effort to play this unless you just really wanna try every PS1 horror game.
Upon seeing some of the actual monsters that show up in-game I immediately recognized their designs as being specifically based upon the artwork in Chaosium's 1988 supplement, Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters, which was published in Japan in 1989. When you see this kind of cosmic horror stuff in games, especially Japanese games, it generally tends to be derived from Chaosium's tabletop work more so than the original stories, so it's not surprising this was the reference point. Though it was surprising just how blatantly the designs were based on Tom Sullivan's original paintings.
Neat trivia about the game's design aside I think this is probably one that's not really worth playing. Judging it today I get the sense that it would be a far better game if it was condensed down to around 1-2 hours, but of course players back in 1998 likely wouldn't have appreciated paying for such a short experience. Looking at it in the context of when it releasd, it might have gotten away with this sort of design based on the novelty factor of being a 3D horror game alone in 1995 or 96, but by 98 there were so many better and more interesting horror games on the platform with even more to come.
...Iru! unfortunately is not one of those games. With a fan-translation released in 2021 there's hardly anything written about the game in English. Reviews from Japan back in 98 show that it wasn't a popular or well-received game in its home country either and it only takes playing it for a little while to understand why.
An adventure game at heart, Iru is built around wandering the halls of your character's high school after closing hours as you help your friend prepare for an upcoming festival. It starts out promising enough with an eerie atmosphere and those lovely low poly PS1 environments and characters. Sadly it doesn't take long before the game reveals its hand.
The gameplay consists entirely of walking back and forth between the same few halls and dozen rooms. Puzzles are straightforward and items are mostly easy to find, but progression is locked so tightly to following the precise, linear path the game sets for you and triggering cutscenes. The actual explorable space is so repetitive and you spend most of it just scouring these same rooms over and over, looking for whatever the next story event is that will allow you to progress.
Previously empty rooms will have new events or items appear in them randomly and only occasionally does the game see fit to give you any nudge to where you should look next. I'm not opposed to letting the player explore freely, but when you have such a small play area with so little new to see it stops being exploration and just starts to feel like you're creating a mental checklist of rooms and going down it after every single event. No sense of dread or curiosity the game tries to instill can survive this tedium.
It takes way too long for the playable space to expand beyond a single floor of the school and when it does you realize that every area is basically the same. If anything it makes the game even worse because now you have to keep checking even more areas for the path forward. There's never a change of scenery until the very end of the game.
Most of the time you can't actually die, save for a handful of scripted danger sequences in which you have to hide from enemies. These are very infrequent and its easy to survive them even without any foreknowledge they're coming. The game has a couple different routes and endings, but they vary incredibly little.
The story draws heavily on the Cthulhu Mythos, and when I say heavily I do mean heavily. Various monster names and grimoires and other such things are tossed at the player with such frequency and reckless abandon that it would make even the hackiest of pastiche horror writers blush. Sure I got a kick out of this the first few times, but it wasn't long before I was rolling my eyes at the unending namedrops. I do admit that it was neat to have this element of the game dropped on me since I didn't go in expecting it.
There is some intrigue early on in the actual plot, when you're unsure exactly what's going on and what the danger is, and I particularly enjoyed how examining the environments can sometimes reveal elements of the story before they would have appeared otherwise, but nothing ever comes of this. Even if you, personally manage to figure out what's going on early your character will remain a doofus for the sake of preserving the existing story. It was nice to see that as a horror story it really doesn't pull any punches in being quite brutal to the characters. Still, it's really not interesting enough to make it worth the effort to play this unless you just really wanna try every PS1 horror game.
Upon seeing some of the actual monsters that show up in-game I immediately recognized their designs as being specifically based upon the artwork in Chaosium's 1988 supplement, Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters, which was published in Japan in 1989. When you see this kind of cosmic horror stuff in games, especially Japanese games, it generally tends to be derived from Chaosium's tabletop work more so than the original stories, so it's not surprising this was the reference point. Though it was surprising just how blatantly the designs were based on Tom Sullivan's original paintings.
Neat trivia about the game's design aside I think this is probably one that's not really worth playing. Judging it today I get the sense that it would be a far better game if it was condensed down to around 1-2 hours, but of course players back in 1998 likely wouldn't have appreciated paying for such a short experience. Looking at it in the context of when it releasd, it might have gotten away with this sort of design based on the novelty factor of being a 3D horror game alone in 1995 or 96, but by 98 there were so many better and more interesting horror games on the platform with even more to come.