Dai Obake Yashiki（大幽霊屋敷 〜浜村淳の実話怪談〜）

Funny Jhipster story, I was searching for info on this game based on the cover art of the copy that yes I physically own and Google had to autocorrect because I thought 幽 was actually 山. The cover designer thought it would be clever to make little blue ghost lights instead of properly writing out the little 幺 parts. To add insult to injury, that's not even the regular Kanji for a haunted house, it's like geesh, stop trying to be "artistic".

Oh thanks (read as: fuck you) for the furigana

Ok yeah, talking about Kanji isn't exactly like super fun blog post but really that's the most interesting thing I could come up with when talking about this borefest. Maybe I played too many horror games and am jaded. Other Jhipsters might find it scary but personally, this game was perfect for turning off the lights, laying in bed, and just fucking falling dead asleep like a log bored to tree sap tears. The spine card says, "Please don't play by yourself" and they're right. You can seriously injure yourself if you suddenly fall asleep in random places. In fact, they should have added an extra warning to never play when operating heavy machinery. Lawsuit waiting to happen right there, IMO.

It's unfortunately not half as scary as it looks

To sum up the "game", you go through a series of PS1 era CG tour of the haunted house while you hear or read scary stories from the staff. The scary stories are very typical ghost stories like, "I was walking home at night and I saw a ghost! Scary!" For some reason, there were a lot of stories about obasans. Total speculation here but I'm guessing it's because they could reuse various pictures of the same old lady with the scary make-up.

Geesh mom! How many times have I told you to knock first?!

There's was a minor meta story about the owner of the haunted house and I liked the credits as they show where ghosts are hiding in the real life pictures that were used throughout the game. I liked the 90s Japan aesthetics as well.

Hey, that's my apartment working as a coporate salaryman slave back in the day!

Score: 1.5 scariest part is when the obasan opens the door while you're masturbating out of 5

If the idea of an audio book of "scary" campfire stories on the PS1 appeals to you, go right ahead and give this a whirl. (Needless to say, you also need to be fluent in Japanese.) It was a good one for me to go through in a couple of nights because I've been having trouble going to sleep due to stress. Additional bonus, it's a time respecter so it was nice to be able to purge this one and make room for another game in my hoarder closet.

You'll need to play through it twice to read and hear all the stories but you can skip through the repeats pretty quickly which is I why I gave it an extra .5 score for being technically easy to blast through.

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely