I've really enjoyed reading ever since I learned how to do it as a kid, and going through a “it's not a phase mom” phase in grade school introduced me to all the options. Combine all of this with my enduring love for Nintendo that glued me to my DS back in the day, and I was practically doomed to enjoy visual novels. And when I saw a few of them on the menu at PAX West, I had to go in to try the few that excited me the most.
However, as someone who also loves to farm sims, I know a thing or two about genre fatigue overshadowing what might otherwise have been a pretty neat title. Playing a new game in the shadow of another, very similar game makes direct comparisons impossible to avoid. Creepy visual novels that really suck you in, however, come out so rarely that they always feel welcome.
When it comes to genre-defining hits like Danganronpa or Corpse Party, new titles launch with enough breathing space between entries and enough changes and tweaks that they never feel completely rehashed. In the months between releases, there will still be surprise breakout hits like Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo or Doki Doki Literature Club that crown themselves as instant and immortal games in the genre.
Just because many of the greats have come and gone, told their stories and been laid to rest, doesn't mean there isn't much to look forward to. A tricky part of creating games that are creepy or mysterious is that you can never play them for the first time twice, but both standalone titles and sequels are being prepared to carry the proverbial torch. If a game manages to evoke the same emotions as the greats, whether they're direct sequels, spiritual successors, or just taken influence, they still make a lasting deterrent splash.
Corpse Party, despite not launching a new mainline title in a decade, is making a resurgence with Corpse Party 2: Darkness Distortion, and I loved the demo I played at PAX West in August. My trio of cute anime high school girls were stuck in an abandoned hospital for some unknown reason, and I answered a public payphone just in time to hear one of them being murdered on the other end of the line. The same girl started choking to death right next to me, so I hung up frantically to try to save her life. We continued to explore as she caught her breath, quickly finding the corpse of a girl our age right in front of us.
The demo ended after my protagonist sifted barehanded through a pile of days-old vomit next to the body to retrieve a piece of paper in case it was a clue, and although my actual lunch threatened to do its own encore, I left eager to get to the bottom of things when the game launches later this year. Corpse Party is a series that plays in a number of different styles throughout its history – top-down with sprites in the first game before swinging to point-and-click screens in the next, and it changes things up again in Darkness Distortion by putting yourself directly in the first-person shoes of one of the girls. As I raced through the halls using a mini-map and spatial audio for clues as to where to go next, the familiar feeling of fear and dread seeped right back into me after more than a decade.
Amidst that desire was my demo of Urban Myth Dissolution Center, another one-off visual novel that seems to echo everything my colleagues and I loved about Paranormasight last year. Urban Myth Dissolution Center You play as Azami Fukurai, a young woman seeking answers about the horrific apparitions she can almost see while at the titular center. She's given a pair of glasses and suddenly the faint shadows she's seen all her life have transformed into vividly terrifying creatures that always loom in the corner of her vision. Violating something valuable, Azami begins a cycle of indentured servitude solving grisly mysteries to pay off his debt, developing his powers as the game progresses.
It won't launch until early 2025, but Urban Myth Dissolution Center already has the makings of a standout in the genre: ambient sound to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, a relatively monochromatic bluish color palette except where striking blood red accents feel necessary for contrast, a wonderfully off-putting art style and a terrible need to keep pushing into the fear to solve the mystery. You know it's going to be a little scary, but damn, you needs to know what is happening.
I can see why people don't like visual novels (not everyone wants to read their video games), and I can see why people don't like horror (fear is, well, scary). For people like me who enjoy both of those things at the same time whenever possible, but enjoy the unsettling marriage of mystery and the macabre, the future looks bright. Sure, we'll never be playing the classics we look back on so fondly for the first time ever again, but we still have some really new news to look forward to.