Howling Village: Echoes

（中文评测在下面！） Howling Village: Echoes (Inunakimura: Zankyou) is the official game to the 2020 J-horror film Howling Village (Inunakimura), which is directed by Shimizu Takashi and features Miyoshi Ayaka. The game was originally released in mobile platform in 2020, and now it is ported onto NS and PC. (The porting is bad though, the game even tells you to TAP the screen rather than CLICK.) It's basically a point&click puzzle game with a linear story-telling. The game features 6 main characters, each one has its own route, and each route has its True Ending. The True Ending to a route is always blocked at first, you should play other routes to unlock it (like 428: Shibuya Scramble in a much simpler way). The game makes you feel like you have many choices and options, but in fact you don't. In order to clear the game you must play each route and each chapter in a certain order to unlock the True Ending. Like I said, it's pretty linear. As for the "more than 50 endings" they claim in the store page, well, it does have that many endings, but most of them are just meaningless Bad Ends. The game only has ONE TRUE ENDING, and you can't ever miss it. By the way, the translation is very bad.…

I gave it a shot and I just couldn't get into it. It felt like it was very lazily trassfered from mobile. It's unique game mechanics I've seen playing Siren. Pros: - The Movie tie in is dope - It's got the classic ol J-horror visual novel horror vibe. Cons: - The port from mobile was... lazy (they literally give the touch screen instructions instead of pc instructions) - The story pacing is very slow - the controls are not the most intuitive which is saying a lot as their isn't a lot of controls. - The 50+ endings are just the ends of chapters not the end of the game - Akira's music isn't featured like it should be Overall I can say I wanted to like it. Maybe on mobile with lower expectations I'd think different but the PC port I can only give 15 out of 52 endings.

Howling Village Echoes isn’t a bad game by any means, but it’s far from great and severely flawed. My biggest issue has less to do with the gameplay itself - which is your run-of-the-mill point-and-click - and more to do with the outright horrendous writing these characters have. The first few were tolerable, but once a character named Shinji comes in and says arguably some of the dumbest, most cringe ♥♥♥♥ I’ve heard in a long time that sounded like a 6th grader trying to show his equally neurologically challenged friends “this cool story I wrote”, it goes downhill from there. In fact, it’s so downhill one could argue it just collapses. Every character then on is just insufferable, which is a shame because, despite the repetition, the gameplay itself is engaging enough to want to keep going if you’re into the stories and folklore surrounding Inunaki Tunnel and Inunaki Village (though it’s worth mentioning Howling Village Echoes does the bare minimum in the point-and-click, hidden object, and puzzle scenarios). You’ll find the bulk of it to feel very low effort, and I feel if this game had come out potentially 10-15 years ago it may have been better received, but there’s no reaso…

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧