You might just think that Yomawari: Lost in the Dark is the cutest little 2D isometric horror title that you’ve ever played, until the entire screen explodes with blood that is, after being munched on by a demon-like creature.
Controlling a girl by the name of Yuzu you need to piece together her forgotten memories in a haunted town and rid her of a curse with only a flashlight and your ability to pick up objects.
As the game amusingly states before you play, ‘In the event you look away from the screen while playing, we are not responsible for what you may see’, and its this kind of area in which Yomawari: Lost in the Dark plays around in, always attempting to do something outside of your expectations.
Apart from jumpy scares from gigantic and incredibly ugly ghouls that appear out of nowhere to block your path, the scariest element is tension provided from the decent variety of enemies that roam the town at night. They can attack/ be dealt with in a number of different ways – most of them will give chase once you are in their sights, but you can throw objects to distract them, attempt to outrun them or in some cases close your eyes and hope that the red heat spot that represents the enemy will go straight passed you.
Futhermore, your heartbeat becomes audible and beats faster and louder as you get closer to a ghoul, while also rumbling the controller and making your character panic and exponentially run out of stamina. This has been finely tuned so that you are likely to exhaust your energy just as you are being chased in the game’s most tense scenes and makes every dash for a gap nail-biting as death is around every corner, hidden in every shadow and is just one hit away.
The dark secrets of the town are interlinked with your own personal mystery as ghouls who require your help often hold the key (sometimes literally) to unlocking your own memories. These mysteries inhabit the creepiest of areas, with rice fields, abandoned tunnels and a graveyard just a name few, and end with some difficult bosses whose attacks come at you thick and fast.
The main story and the boss designs by themselves are great concepts for the game to hang its hat, but unfortunately, the game’s majority pivots towards spending an inordinate amount of time adventuring and backtracking around town to find countless items to help ghouls, which takes the atmospheric streets and makes their random traversing a frustrating experience, with numerous roadblocks and one-hit deaths that send you back to checkpoints ages away.
There are other niggling issues with the game like there being no visible transition from the game’s cutscenes to live-action sections, meaning that the game knows that it’s go time – but you don’t – so as you are waiting for the cutscene to progress, an enemy will walk over to kill you – which is always nice.
Also, despite the sound design’s adeptness, its missing a trick with the omission of voice acting, with many an emotional scene that could have been elevated with its inclusion. One could argue, that without it there is still a sense of reading a childrens folktale with its graphics, with a Japanese design taken from the ukiyo-e art style, but there is still something lacking without it.
Typically, I tend to tire with horror games more than others as they often lull both in the story and gameplay and I generally give up before the end, and if it wasn’t for wanting to find out how Yuzu’s story would end, chances are I would have given up here as well as there simply aren’t enough consistently exciting elements on offer.
Yomawari: Lost in the Dark is a decent horror title that never quite allows itself to excel in any particular area. Japanese horror fans will enjoy the variety of enemies and the scares, but outside of the cleanly drawn visuals and a decent story, it can’t escape the demon of its own design – a short runtime that just feels too long due to its repetitive gameplay and late-revealing secrets.
