clickbliss — Yomawari Night Alone Short Review

Yomawari Night Alone Short Review

Yomawari Night Alone
Developer- Nippon Ichi
Publisher- Nippon Ichi
PC, PS Vita

I’m going to be honest: it’s taken me this long to write about Yomawai because just looking at the desktop icon for the game fills me with anxiety. It’s joined Silent Hill 2, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and Neverending Nightmares in the ranks of games that are both imminently compelling, and something I dread playing.

There’s something absolutely exhausting in the way that Yomawari plays on your vulnerabilities. Some of it is cheap, using the gut punch of bad things happening to an innocent child right from the start. It makes it no less shocking, but it feels crude in a game that, for the most part, works with subtly. Wandering around the dark town, catching apparitions, and closing your eyes waiting for danger to pass by–it’s all simple, but remarkably effective. Yomawari is happen to leave terror at the periphery. It will mark out things immediately dangerous to you with a racing pulse, but there’s plenty hiding in background, just there to unsettle you.

If nothing else, Yomawari captures the terror of being lost as a child. While the locations you search may all be within your neighborhood, there’s something about darkness that throws away all that familiarity. As someone who’s just moved away from the city, there’s something about how absolute the darkness can be outside of populous areas that’s captured well here.

Part of what makes those feelings work, however, can also make it tedious to play. The map never gives you a particularly good idea of exactly where you are, which adds to the disorientation, but can get frustrating if you just want to know where you are. And as gorgeous as the 2D art can be, the 8-way directional movement that results from it can be a liability when trying to escape a particularly nasty apparition. It all results in some trial and error when trying to find your way, which at times adds greatly to the terror, and in others has you meet your death repeatedly until the impact is dulled.

Yomawari, in some ways, feels like a companion to a series like Yamishibai. Short, well punctuated, with a rich paper doll style of animation that does as much to suggest something horrible as it does to depict it. It hits its peaks and valleys in the same ways. At its best it unsettles you in a way that weighs on you. At its worst it disappoints as it goes for cheap shock.