Pason Retro is a regular look back at the early days of PC gaming in Japan, covering everything from specialist computers in the 1980s to the blissful days of Windows XP.
I’ve never seen a game build supernatural tension as effectively as Onryo Senki. 1988Neither the deadly frame, nor the devotion, and even your first trip to Silent Hill, can match the level of terror that goes, “I’m not scared, I just want to sleep with the lights on for a week.” Game content that patiently stalks the player like prey, waiting to strike at the perfect moment.
I also haven’t seen another game ship with protection Ofuda Designed to ward off evil spirits like Onyro Senki. This clever packaging slightly emphasizes the PC-88 version’s warning that playing without protection will summon a malicious ghost. This little square of printed paper is like a blunt “no, really” warning when starting a scary story. This physically suggests that this story may not be as fictional as anyone playing might expect.
Onmyo Senki begins with the protagonist Hiroyuki Kitahara (an ordinary programmer who works for a large national bank) being attacked by demons while walking through a peaceful moonlit night in the very ordinary city he calls home. . The hospital claims that his memory is just an unfortunate side effect of the shock from being attacked by a stray dog. I want to clarify
Onmyo Senki takes its time just to establish this plausible baseline level of denial, and is able to deftly erode it with the following in-game days: In a slightly surprised park, Kitahara dies. You can see them eating dogs.
This is all done in an adventure game stored on just a few floppy disks, controlled by simple commands selected from a text-based sidebar, displaying a static image of the scene in a neat little rectangle. increase. The artwork is mostly heavily dithered and colored using striking combinations of midnight blues and inky blacks. Detailed enough to resemble a particular place or scene, but always dreamlike and obscure. In many ways, this is an early form of shadows, fog, and film grain seen in later horror games. Visual noise is a natural hiding place for ghosts and ghouls.
sound on
Kitahara’s desire to investigate the city’s burgeoning occult phenomenon leads him to create a program for an online-enabled computer terminal at home. This was very high tech in the late 80’s. This seemingly innocuous aid is in fact the perfect fear-enhancing tool, and he (and I) has witnessed a constant stream of reports of people being officially attacked by “dogs” and “monkeys” and their locations. You can access a map showing the . Thanks to this information, it’s easy to see how dangers change and grow as the game progresses. More and more districts turn from peaceful blue to ominous red as a ghostly threat spreads throughout the city.
An annotated map included in the manual helps you understand the short list of place names you can choose from at each location. Kitahara’s mission to find out the truth is divided into day and night, with the purpose of gathering information widely during the day and acting based on it during the moonlit night. Ghosts appear randomly at first, and during these loiterings they flicker silently, only at night. Something It’s so quick it’s hard to be sure there was anything there.
The first subtlety of these hauntings is what makes them so effective. They aren’t jump scares designed to make me scream, they’re independent otherworldly beings, background faces. I try to force it. The first time it happened I went back to the same area and… nothing. I checked my screenshots folder and… no, I wasn’t fast enough to catch whatever “it” was. There’s nothing more unsettling than a game that makes you question your senses.
After a while it becomes clear that these symptoms “do nothing” other than appear and disappear, and intrepid players may start looking for them for fun…and by then those “harmless” Ghosts start hanging out — just being on screen, Looking—everyone drawn in such a way that they could make direct eye contact with me.
image 1 of Five
A disembodied head occasionally appears on the street just outside Kitahara’s house, staring straight out of the screen. There were no ghosts near my house before. something has changed It seems that Kitahara is not alone in his quiet moments in the dark. He is vulnerable and feels like the dead are closely following his every move.
I find myself wishing the world would be unraveled sooner rather than go through this excruciatingly slow-burning pain any more. I’m teetering, but I’m not ready to fall into the abyss just yet.
The inevitable collapse of normalcy is worth the wait, and when the ghostly events of Onryo Senki finally cross the point of no return, it’s an eerie tapestry that’s spent hours unraveling in spectacular fashion. Ordinary people are haunted by ghosts in the streets, and sightings can no longer be dismissed as angry wildlife, and so fiercely undeniable that police and mayors are formally involved. Ordinary citizens are in a hurry to leave the city in fear. The seasoned priest attempts to fight back and is decapitated on live television in broad daylight. The good old days of spooky little sightings at night and fear of strange talking demons feel quaint by comparison.
Kitahara is able to ward off evil spirits using special mantras and mudras, which are religious chants and hand gestures, but he is far from an all-powerful video game protagonist. The dead can appear violently at will, turning the screen a terrifying blood red in the process.I’m not using these skills to brave the afterlife; I give myself enough breathing room to move safely from one place to another as I run around the city looking for answers. Temporal.
image 1 of 3
However, despite this apparent danger, there are only a few places in Onmyoji Senki where Kitahara can actually die, and most can be avoided with just a little thought and common sense. You might think that would reduce the impact of horror. Too many horror games are based on monsters tearing apart in seconds. But Onryo Senki works differently. If anything, Kitahara’s virtually guaranteed survival only intensifies everything happening around him.
There is no easy escape for players, and no convenient excuse to leave the game for the day. There’s no chance to get used to (or get bored of) the horrifying scenes by reloading repeatedly.instead is more When bad To the last. Onryo Senki continues to turn every shadow into a lurking ghost, every silence into a monster holding its breath patiently, making every event just a little more devilishly shocking than the previous one until the credits roll. make it something
Now, where did you put that bill…?
