If you wish Ghostwire: Tokyo was an actual horror game, try the demo for Chiyo
Exorcisimulation
The Xmas season approaches, but for some of us, Halloween never ends. I've just finished (well, reached a grisly end within) the demo for Chiyo, a first-person horror game from Nimbus Games, set in Edo era Japan, in which you are a plucky young mystic sent by the Tokugawa Shogunate's Magical Arcane Division to investigate and cleanse a spooky abandoned mansion on the coast.
Much like the protagonist of fellow Japan-set exor-simulator Ghostwire: Tokyo, you have a brace of occult, gesture-based powers with which to explore and, hopefully, vanquish any lurking spirits, but so far, the only ones I've gotten access to are a funky finger torch, the ability to unseal cursed doors, and the ability to see glowing puzzle props through surfaces. I very much do not feel like an Edo era John Constantine. I don't even feel like an Edo era Scooby Doo. I mean, at least he was good at running away: the titular Chiyo waddles about like she's worried her trousers are about to fall down.
One of the early signs a horror game is doing an effective job, for me, is that I start closing all the doors behind me to thwart an ambush or simply, the sight of Something Unpleasant. Or leaving them open, because I don't want to be faffing around with Amnesia-style object physics when I'm running away. Or standing there in paralysis, unable to decide whether to close or shut the doors and argh argh argh, what's that banging in the ceiling?
The house itself is appealingly/oppressively wrought, with blood-spattered sliding shoji partitions, ornamental fans, rain battering the slates and candles not-quite-illuminating the ends of corridors. There are journal pages and the like to unearth that hint at tortuous family shenanigans, while also conferring puzzle hints. The intro narration properly hams it up, and the English localisation is a bit scruffy, but it's nothing deal-breaking.
The early scripted scares are similarly touch and go: at one point, an object fell over dramatically and I was all like 'what next, Mr Ghost, whispering in the walls?' (Subsequently, there was whispering in the walls.) But the game's escape room structure lends it a nice sense of mounting intensity. I had to solve a puzzle that involved placing objects on plinths beneath a picture of a woman with her face averted. I knew full well that solving this puzzle would prompt an escalation of some kind, which didn't stop me jumping out of my skin when Something Unpleasant buzzed out of the shadows and swallowed my character whole.
Playing Chiyo left me curious about the developer's previous game Malice, which, it turns out, is the sorry recipient of an Overwhelmingly Negative user consensus on Steam, at the time of writing. Mind you, it appears that a sizeable portion of that reaction has to do with it being a mandatory co-op game that was/is prone to disconnects - Chiyo is single player only. There's also a sharp split between the English language reviews, which are Mostly Positive, and the rest.
It feels like there's a bigger story here. In the meantime, I found Chiyo's demo enjoyably harrowing and reckon you should give it a whirl. Certainly, it's alleviated a little of my disappointment at discovering that Ghostwire: Tokyo is more of an open world action sim, in which you purge the spectres by doing elemental combos at them. The full game's slated to release in Q4 2023.