I’ve really enjoyed reading ever since I learned how to do it as a kid, and going through an ‘it’s not a p﷽hase mom’ phase in grade school introduced me to all things alternative. Pair all that with my enduring love for Nintendo gluing me to my DS back in the day, and I was practically fated to enjoy visual novels. And when I saw some of them on the menu at PAX West, I had to get in to try the few that excited me the most.
As someone who also loves farming sims, though, I know a thing or two about genre fatigue eclipsing what may otherwise have been a pretty neat title. Playing a new game in the shadow of anoth𝐆er, very similar game makes direct comparisons impossible to avoid. Creepy visual novels that really suck you in, though, come out so infrequently that they always feel welcome.
14 Spooky Visual Novels🔥 To Get You In The Halloween Mood
Visual Novels make for some engaging story experience, an♓d there are some that offer spooky atmospheres perfect for Hall🍸oween.
When it comes to genre defining hits like or Corpse Party, new titles launch with enough breathing room between entries and enough changes and tweaks that they never feel completely rehashed. During the months between releases, there will still be surprise breakout hits like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Paranormasi𝓰ght: The Seven Mysteries of 🔯Honjo or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Doki Doki Literature Club that crown t🍨hemselves as immediate and immortal games in t⛎he genre.
Just because plenty of the greats have come and gone, told their stories, and been laid to rest, that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to look forward to. One tricky part of making games that are scary or mysterious is that you can never play them for the first time twice, but both standalone titles and series continuatio🐽ns are gearing up to carry the proverbial torch. If a gam𓆉e manages to evoke the same feelings as the greats, whether they’re direct sequels, spiritual successors, or just took influence, they still make an enduringly off-putting splash.
Corpse Party, despite not having launched a new mainline title in a decade, is resurrecting itself with , and I loved the demo I played at PAX West back in August. My trio of cute anime high school girls were stuck in an abandoned hospital for reasons u꧒nknown, and I answered a public payphone just in time to hear one of them get murdered on the other end of the line. The same 𝕴girl started choking to death right beside me, so I hung up frantically to try and save her life. We carried on with our exploring once she caught her breath, quickly finding the corpse of a girl our age just up ahead.
The demo ended after my protagonist sifted bare-handed through a pile of days-old vomit next to the body to retrieve a piece of paper in case it was a clue, and even if my actual lunch was threatening to make its own encore appearance, I left eager to get to the bottom of things when the game launches later this year. Corpse Party is a series played in a number of different styles throughout its history - top-down with sprites in the first game before pivoting to point-and-click screens in the next, and it chan♐ges things up yet again in Darkness Distortion by putting you directly into the first-person shoes of one of the girls. Tip-toeing through the halls using a minimap and spatial audio for clues on where to go next, that familiar sense of fear and dread seeped righ♒t back into me after more than a decade.
Layering onto that desire was my demo of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Urban Myth Dissolution Center, another one-off visual novel that seems to echo everything myself and my colleagues loved about Paranorma🔯sight last year. You play U♔rban Myth Dissolution Center as Azami Fukurai, a young woman seeking answers about the ghastly apparitions that she can almost see when she finds herself at the titular Center. She’s given a pair of glasses and suddenly, the faint shadows she’s seen her whole life transform into vividly horrifying creatures, always looming in the corner of her vision. Azami breaking something valuable begins a cycle of indentured servitude solving creepy mysteries to pay off her debt, developing her powers more as the game unfolds.
It’s not launching until early 2025, but Urban Myth Dissolution Center already has the trappings of a standout in the genre: ambient sound to keep the hairs on the back of your neck standing up, a relatively monochromatic bluish color palette except for where strikingly blood red emphasis feels necessary for contrast, a wonderfully off-putting art style, and a haunting need to keep pressing into the fear to solve the mystery at hand. You know it’s going to be kind of horrifying, but dammit, you need to know what happens.
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 these things at once whenever possible, though, savoring the unsettling marriage of mystery and the macabre, the future's looking bright. Sure, we’ll never play the classics we look back on so fondly for the first time ever again, but we’ve still got some really cool new firsts to look forward to ahead.
168澳😼洲幸运5开奖网: Urban Myth Dissolution Center
- Released
- February 13, 2025
- Developer(s)
- Hakababunko ꦑ
- Publisher(s)
- ꦆ Shueisha Games 𓄧
- Number of Players
- 1
- Steam Deck Compatibility
- Unknown
- PC Release Date
- February 13, 2025
- PS5 Release Date
- February 13, 2025
The Urban Myth Dissolution Center – your one-stop solution for researching and (dis)solving monstrous oddities, cursed relics, and dimensional anomalies! Take on urban myth cases as heroine Azami Fukurai, under the supervision of Ayumu Meguriya, Level S psychic and Center Director.
The game is an episodical digital mystery adventure themed on multiple urban myths that roam the internet and presented in stunning psychedelic pixel art.
The player takes control of Azami for the detective legwork, collecting circumstantial evidence and social network posts to unravel the truth behind each urban myth, the hidden pasts of each client, and why they came to encounter each oddity. Dis(solve) each myth and case to discover each episode's resolution and unexpected consequences.
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