Forbidden Ground - Lair of Aooni -

this game is incredibly disappointing. so much of this game is spent slowly walking back and forth between places on this huge, repetitive map with little to no direction on what you're actually supposed to do half the time. unlike the mainline games, where figuring out how to solve a problem is part of the fun, in this one, reading where you're supposed to go next wrong can cost you agonising minutes slowly walking down long corridors to go try something else. it's boring. especially in the parts where you're punished for running. i want to beat this game as a fan of the series but i'm not having much fun doing it. the story is interesting, but i hate that my "reward" for spending like 20 minutes slowly escorting the slowest person on the planet 5 times in a row is hearing these characters i could not care less about say something completely uninteresting about their personal lives. it adds nothing to the gameplay, the immersion, or the story. i want to hear more about the aooni, but instead that's relegated to bonus text you can read in a menu. i wouldn't hate that if at least some of that story was told throughout the game, rather than just being a text document you can pause…

Honestly very disappointing. A huge step down from their last AO ONI game. All though the style is somewhat decent, and I do appreciate them adding more variants of oni, the game was just a huge let down. First of all I got jumpscared by the fact that you had to use controller, and it wasn't keyboard friendly. So my first 20 minutes of the game was just messing around with my settings to properly get the game to adjust to arrow keys and such. Once I got that figured out, I proceeded to explore and walk around only to realize that 84% of this game is just going back and forth, without making real progress. The voice acting was a little annoying, and VERY VERY SLOW TEXTBOX speed. And I had no idea who was talking half of the time. This game added NOTHING to the story, and actually somehow managed to remove more than add. Sure they had moments of adding lore, but in the grand picture, it isn't much. I don't think the OG owners of AOONI made a smart choice to sell this IP, since its clearly being used just for milking cash and fast purposes. Such a shame due to the fact that I loved ao oni all the way back in 2014. The controls on the player were weird, for some reason you have…

Awesome game, awesome saga, awesome movies. I hate to carry people with broken legs around. P.S. If you get stuck in the basement because a big four-leg aooni is in your way, just use "possession" to use the doll as soon as the aooni is going to enter in your camera, if you stay put enough, the lantern's doll will shut, and the aooni will walk past you. No, you can't find this information anywhere (reddit, wiki, ...) yes it took me a while to figure it out. Still peak.

I’m a fan of Ao Oni games, but this one is very disappointing. The story starts abruptly and moves forward without any explanation. “Why they are there?”, “Why Himari can’t move alone?”, “Who is the mastermind behind the events”... If you expected a horror-mystery game where you get anwers, pass this one. In addition, the gameplay is really slow and you have to go back and forth dozens of times for any small thing. Rescuing your classmates is a really pain too, because we move very slowly with them and we can only move one at a time. At the same time, the gameplay for the flashlight is nonsense: we can interact with some objects or doing some actions without the flashlight despite to be in the dark, but we need it to open the doors or hiding…(I would like to know the logic behind this).

amazing game, great story, i liked it a lot more then the 1st one, anyone that says its too hard is a no skilled goober with no patience

Forbidden Ground - Lair of Aooni is an atmospheric Japanese horror adventure that builds its identity around isolation, supernatural mystery, and the disturbing history of a place that should have remained buried. Developed and published by HYDE, Inc., it follows Himari, a young girl searching for her missing parents alongside other children. Their investigation eventually leads to Koshiwa Elementary School, an abandoned building that had been submerged after the construction of a dam. When drought causes the water level to fall, the forgotten school emerges once again, creating an immediately unsettling location for the events that follow. The concept of exploring a school recovered from beneath a reservoir is one of the game's strongest ideas. Rather than presenting an ordinary abandoned building without much context, the setting carries its own history and sense of tragedy. The old classrooms and corridors represent a community that effectively disappeared beneath the water, and the Showa-era influences give the environment a noticeably different character from contemporary horror settings. The school feels like a preserved fragment of another time, and uncovering what happened…