Yomawari: Midnight Shadows

Yomawari Midnight Shadows is a good game, but it's definitely a step down from the first game. The story is still nothing to really write home about, but the main duo of Yui and Haru pull at heart strings more, and definitely have more development in general. It has a lot of gorgeous little scenes that show the team was more confident in designing environments, but the atmosphere is a bit dampened by it feeling a bit more gameplay heavy. It still boils down to the same gameplay loop of starting a night, doing some specific objective, boss fight, rinse and repeat for a few hours. Your flashlight shows spirits, but some are visible no matter what. What changes a bit with this game is that it has a lot more spirits than the first game, and their lethality is turned up by eleven. Your average gamer will die a lot, and the game seems to compensate for this by giving you a lot more coins to save at the Jizo statues and tons of new items to deal with the various new spirits. Jizo Statues now also actually save instead of being general quicksave spots. Also a new form of "puzzle" is in the game, with you needing to carry or push objects in the environment. It's not really a puzzle though…

Why is it that we seek out fear? Whatever the reason may be, after you’ve endured the trials and repeated your errors, you might find yourself drawn into the story of two girls and two dogs. It’s then that you may realize the emotion swelling within you isn't fear at all, but something closer to a sense of loss, or sadness, or even regret.

Important notice: I ran the game with no issues on one of the computers that couldn't run the previous episode. In general, fortunately, it seems to have fewer reported issues or, at the very least, they took care to fix them. From the opening moments, and remembering how the first game started, I'm pretty sure one of the creators suffered a serious trauma related to a dog as a child. Then it gets even more shocking. And it's just the tutorial. It's one of the valid reasons this game got an M rating, compared to the T rating of [b]Night Alone[/b]. Not much has truly changed in the couple of years (only one year for Steam users) between episodes. The trouble with aligning with interactable objects is mostly gone, and most encounters with [i]yokai[/i] felt a bit fairer while playing, with fewer chances of being jumped on with no chance to react; more of them also act according to whether the torch is on or off. It's more generous with essential coins for saving and activating fast travel points, as I often found more than I could hold. Objects on the ground, whether consumables or collectibles, are still represented by twinkles but are more visible, and when a collectible is found,…

Not as good or interesting as a first one, rehash, very unbalanced

x-- 8/10 --x Amazing horror game, despite the cute graphics there are some genuine moments that scared the heck out of me.

The story here gets an huge improvement compared to the first entry and the game is longer. If you liked the first this one is simply an improvement my only critique being the eccessive number of boss encounters in the second part of the game that maybe took away from the exploration aspect. It's hard to explain exactly what i mean but wile i learned the first game city map i diden't in this... Best game in the series overall and one of my favorite 5 games in absolute.