![yomawari night alone switch yomawari night alone switch](https://www.gamersglobal.de/sites/gamersglobal.de/files/steckbrief/cover/280/Yomawari_NightAlone_Cover.jpg)
This leads to some quirks that, again, some would chalk up to be weaknesses in the ‘gameplay’, but I found to be completely thematically appropriate. In place of the jump scares of most horror games is the sheer terror of taking a couple of steps in one direction only to see a hulking spirit loom up, lit up by the edge of the torchlight. The game takes place entirely at night, and outside of a weak torch, our little girl can’t see much of anything. Yomawari, like Project Zero, makes that theme core to its experience. Traditional Japanese architecture actually leaves a lot of these pools of shadow, and that naturally ignites the imagination when it comes to telling stories of horror and mystery. Yomawari is an exercise in atmosphere and aesthetics, and it’s masterful at that.Ī few years ago now, when I spoke to Keisuke Kikuchi from Koei Tecmo about Project Zero - another example of the classical Japanese horror aesthetic as applied to video games - he said that one of the sources of fear in Japanese folk horror is the “dark spaces” under floors and in the corners of Japanese homes. They’ll claim Yomawari ‘lacks gameplay’ or ‘is too easy’, or whatever, but that’s missing the point. Now, I just know this is going to be a red mark against the game for many. It’s generally quite easy to escape the spirits, and once you’re in a hiding spot you’re safe I don’t know whether I was just lucky, but unlike in other stalker horror games (Clock Tower, Haunting Ground, Corpse Party), the little girl was never “found” by a spirit once she had dived into a hiding spot. There she cowers in fear until the spirits move on. The girl naturally has no recourse to fight back, and instead can only flee the spirits until she finds a bush or sign to hide behind. The problem is that somehow the village where she lives has now become infested with spirits that want to chase down this little girl and kill her, for no apparent reason.
![yomawari night alone switch yomawari night alone switch](https://www.zockerheim.de/zockerheim/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Yomawari-CE-Switch.jpg)
Hours later the sister hasn’t returned, so it’s up to our little girl to go find them both. Our little hero’s sister, upon realising that the dog is lost, decides to go looking for him. You play as a little girl, who loses her dog while walking him in the opening scene, and returns home with a lead and no pet. Set in the summer (the tell-tale chirps of the insects setting the scene here), Yomawari doesn’t have much by way of explicit narrative, but much like the yūrei-ga, the scenario itself is enough to shock and engage. It would be easy to simply consider it in the tradition of stalker horror games, or compare it directly to Corpse Party, which is perhaps its closest cousin in gaming, but that would be ignoring the centuries of heritage that informed this game and doing the overall experience a grave injustice. Why the art history lesson? Yomawari: Night Alone is yūrei-ga as an interactive game, both thematically and aesthetically, and that makes it really quite special. So, when I do come across a game that represents the yūrei-ga tradition, I immediately fall in love with it. Ito is one of the more famous artists who worked with the genre, and the characteristics of yūrei-ga, from humanoid-looking spirits lacking legs to bloated bodies rising from the water, and images of humanoid-but-monstrous yokai, all highlighted a distinct aesthetic that I don’t see in other cultural interpretations of horror, or, indeed, enough modern Japanese horror works. While I was in Japan this year, I went to an exhibition of Seiu Ito’s yūrei-ga. August – the month of spirits in Japan - would be the month for yūrei-ga (ga being “painting”) exhibitions, and those exhibitions were always very popular indeed. Within that style, some artists focused on ghosts, or yūrei, and the contrast between these works, and the more naturalistic works of so many ukiyo-e, had a chilling influence on audiences.
![yomawari night alone switch yomawari night alone switch](https://goldmetalsonic.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/drgcntcu4aahnh4.jpg)
Called ukiyo-e, you’ve almost certainly seen examples of it in the past: that famous The Great Wave off Kanagawa painting by Hokusai is a very famous example of this style. There, a distinctive style of art emerged. The aesthetic started in the paintings of the Edo era. There’s a specific aesthetic that is unique to Japanese horror, perhaps because so much of it was designed to have that specific impact on its audience. Related reading: Project Zero is another very Japanese horror franchise. They do this precisely because that chilling effect of a good horror experience provides some small relief (psychologically, at least), to the oppressive, stifling heat of the Japanese summer. For centuries the Japanese have flocked to exhibitions of ghost paintings, haunted houses, and the cinema in the hottest months of the year in order to experience scares and chills.