Game Review// .flow

You might remember a long time ago I had a good gush about Yume Nikki. Well, since then I read a little more into the series, discovering its fandom (who mostly lurk in places like 4chan rather than here) and learned a little bit more about the fanmade games. Since YN is an indie game (Dojin Soft), and its creator(s) prove to be pretty elusive themselves, the fans both here and in Japan made their own free games using the same RPGmaker program that YN did. So they're dojin dojin software? Woah, meta. There's mixed results, but two of them looked promising - Yume 2kki, which is unfortunately untranslated as yet (since it's also the fans who translate these games) and .flow. So I figured that, like last time, i'd talk a little about it and maybe you'd want to check it out.

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So overall? It's hard to approach this as someone who didn't play the original first, and if you did it can seem a bit samey. However it does have all the same charm and atmosphere as the last one. Once again you can find yourself playing this into the night without realizing it. In fact I'm going to be charitable about this one and say you could as easily jump into the YN experience from this one as the original, and if you got a kick out of Yume Nikki itself and like free games this one is worth downloading.

Next up I'm going to talk about possibly one of my favourite new horror games Corpse Party. Stay tuned.

Game Review: Corpse Party

Since I just talked about Yume Nikki and .flow I figured now would be a good time to talk about Corpse Party for the PSP, which just came out in November and also started out as an RPGmaker style game. But in terms of comparisons, if those other two were "lost in a garden at night" style nightmares, this is a "forced to watch an endless seal-clubbing" nigtmare. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this is not only one of my favourite horror games, but also one of the few to consistently and variedly scare me. And this wasn't like being scared of the dogs in Resident Evil when I was 12 or having no idea how to survive the bosses in Silent Hill when I wasn't much older - I'm 23 and get a sinking feeling in my gut when I know there's something awful about to happen in this one.

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Overall then this game does many inventive things, challenges the player and is one of the few horror media that not only scare but deeply move the player. And since it's somewhat cheaper than other PSP games (download only), it is well worth buying, even if only to encourage games to take further risks like this one.