#robert fenner

Iru! 

Possibly the most obscure horror title to grace the PlayStation, …Iru! Is a low-budget first-person Lovecraftian adventure from Soft Machine. The game’s title itself has no easy expression in English; “iru (いる) ” denotes the presence of a living being, so the closest translation is probably “…It’s here!” While unintentional, it’s very fitting for a work so tightly entwined with Lovecraft to boast a title that actively defies translation. 

Gakkou de atta Kowai Hanashi 

Take one look at Gakkou de atta Kowai Hanashi (“Gakkowa” by its fans) and you might find it patently absurd. You wouldn’t be wrong; its digitised actors look goofy and unflattering, but there’s more beneath this campy surface. 

Death Mark

From the J-Horror boom of the late 20th century all the way back to the Edo period’s Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai ritualistic storytelling, Japanese tales of the supernatural have a very particular appeal. The protagonists tend to find themselves ensnared by malicious spirits due to no fault of their own, their survival dependent on their willingness to follow specific instructions – the circulation of Sadako’s VHS tape being a contemporary example. Sometimes a fate worse than death is inevitable; an outcome of which master of horror manga Junji Ito is particularly fond.

Similarly, the most popular Japanese urban legends – or toshi densetsu – are horror stories without a fourth wall. Unlike American urban legends, often created as a moral parable against perceived vice – i.e The Hookman in Lover’s Lane a boogeyman for hormonal teens – many Japanese urban legends are, like their literary parents, unlucky encounters with the supernatural. Some of these figures will only call when summoned not unlike Bloody Mary, but what happens when one is literally caught with their pants down by Aka Manto? The listener is now squarely the protagonist, and the vagueness, random appearance, and rules of survival each contribute to the terror – and the excitement – of these modern phantoms. The now ubiquitous presence of the internet has allowed these stories to grow, transform, and spread wider than ever before.

Death Mark is a horror adventure inspired by these urban legends. Helmed by ex-Wizardry alumnus Motoya Ataka and his team of dungeon-crawling experts at Experience, Death Mark mixes the first person perspective and hefty narrative of visual novels with point & click investigation – the protagonist’s flashlight beam serving as the cursor. Being Experience’s first adventure game, they even managed to slip in a few nods to their bread-and-butter: navigating Death Mark‘s haunted locales, gridded mini-map ever present, feels akin to solving mysteries within a dungeon crawler – and it works. 

Spirit Hunter: NG

A year after the release of Death Mark came its follow-up: the SEO-destroying NG. An abbreviation for many concepts within the game – most commonly “No Good” – it’s a daringly obscure title, and one US publisher Aksys Games correctly realized wouldn’t fly in the West. To solve this issue, they prefaced the title with the moniker Spirit Hunter – a header they’d retroactively apply to Death Mark. It was a wise move: initially billed as a spiritual sequel, NG is more or less a direct continuation, albeit with a brand new cast. It’s strongly recommended that the two games be played in order, as NG drops both thematic and direct spoilers for Death Mark. 

Paladin’s Quest / Lennus

Copya System's Lennus series falls somewhere between bad and weird. They're a duo of grindy and time-consuming turn-based JRPGs, but their bizarre art design is unlike anything the genre has seen before, or ever again. The planet Lennus is a pastel-colored world of geometric trees, strange humanoid races that live in eggshell houses, and ravenous beasts of all shapes and sizes: From bug-eyed rabbits to great dinosaurs, with ladybug men in between. It gives the distinct air of 1970s French science fiction, ala Fantastic Planet or the works of the late Jean "Moebius" Giraud, something seen rarely in any video game. Lennus' concept art was by award-winning science fiction illustrators Hiroyuki Katō and Keisuke Gotō, famed for their intensely-detailed covers of Hayakwa S-F Magazine, with monster designs handled by Shuji Imai, illustrator for Nintendo Power (including Howard and Nester, of all things). These three artists, under the guidance of the game's writer/director Hidenori Shibao, managed to create a world that, while not always visually attractive, stood apart from its fantasy manga-style contemporaries. The music is by the prolific Kouhei Tanaka (Gravity Rush, The Granstream Saga, Tengai Makyō), and although it's nothing to write home about, it still manages to fit the game's mood while being pleasant to the ear.