I think I've brought up how I've played a disproportionate amount of horror-themed games this summer so what better response to that could there be than to play another one? It's the only way I'll learn. A couple years back I played an Indie horror adventure game called Red Bow: it sort of took after a few popular cult doujin horror games made with the RPG Maker toolset, such as Yume Nikki, Corpse Party, or Ao Oni, but instead of using that top-down engine it sort of reverse-engineered its own through Adventure Game Studio adopting an 8-bit aesthetic that obfuscated some of the spookier sights but was enough to maintain an unsettling atmosphere. To complete the homage vibe, it took on some traditional Japanese ghost and yokai stories to inspire its collection of sympathetic fiends (developer Stranga Games is actually from Australia, a land without a whole lot of ghost stories since it has plenty of scary monsters in its ecosystem already without needing to invent new ones). That developer is back with a similar narrative experiment in Ashina: The Red Witch, another shaggy dog story of family and loss through the spirit world and one that operates as a sort of sequel or prequel to Red Bow and another of the developer's games, My Big Sister.

Red Bow followed the adventures of Roh, a compassionate young woman whose titular accessory is her most distinguishing characteristic (to be fair, that's about as distinctive as you're going to get in 8-bit: just ask Ms. Pac-Man), as she traversed the spirit world meeting various friendly and less-friendly inhabitants in her search for a way home. Similarly, the player takes on the role of Ash (short for Ashina) who finds herself following a diminutive troublemaker spirit into the other world after it steals a pendant belonging to her mother, Roh. Roh also had another daughter, Tena, a slightly more spoiled and flaky gal who has a decent enough relationship with Ash albeit with some residual resentment hiding beneath the surface due to their respective relationships with their mom: Ash sees herself as the quiet introvert overlooked for the sake of her more attractive and outspoken sister, while Tena feels like she was the maligned black sheep compared to her more reliable sibling. This rivalry is seized upon by a vengeful otherworlder, the bathhouse keeper Muma (the game has more than a few shades of Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away), who takes advantage to enact her own scheme against the land of the living and the powerful red witch that cursed her family. It's a convoluted story that will almost certainly require you play the previous game for much of the necessary context, as well as for a few recurring characters, and the game spends a decent chunk of its runtime on dialogue-heavy cutscenes.

The rest of the gameplay is spent solving traditional adventure game puzzles, much like its predecessor. You can talk to NPCs, investigate hotspots, or use inventory items on either to solve puzzles and make progress, and given the game's episodic structure you're usually limited to a very small number of locations to check out at any given moment. This ensures a minimal amount of wandering around trying to figure out what to do, and instead transplants its sense of challenge into seeking out the series of triggers for the game's best ending. Similar to other horror games set in metaphysical worlds, such as Silent Hill (and specifically the Sam Barlow one), the player is constantly being judged for their morality; choosing to go a little out of your way for the sake of others will cause a small chime to sound, signifying that you've shown kindness in a situation where you did not need to (unlike, say, giving someone an item they asked for so they can help you reach your next destination). Enough of these will prove to the powers that be in this surreal place that Ash is worthy of a better fate than the one the current plot has in store for her. As such, the first playthrough will probably be a cakewalk—the game more or less tells you how to solve every puzzle, reducing most of them to simple errands—but figuring out the optimal solution might take a little more digging on any subsequent run.

As was the case in Red Bow, though Ashina looks better and the presentation in general a bit more confident with an emotionally-resonant core relating to flawed humans and their sometimes taut relationships with one another that's grounded despite the otherwise supernatural setting, there's still flaws aplenty and it's not a game I would wholeheartedly recommend without caveats, though certainly not a bad effort to make a western-made (sorta, it's Australia) version of the sort of cult doujin horror games that you tend to see Japanese VTubers play a lot. (Or, well, maybe just regular streamers. I guess they still exist too.) The game can be a little confusing graphically with regards to doors and hotspots actually worth paying attention to, given everything has the same level of detail; the obfuscation behind finding the flags for the better endings can sometimes have you clicking around at random or else missing out because you moved the story too far at a pivotal point of no return; and the script, despite being written by a native English speaker (presumably), is replete with typos much like it was back in Red Bow with its "wooden creates".

The developer is clearly growing in confidence with each new entry so I hope they don't get dissuaded from writing more stories in this vein (maybe with a proofreader on retainer) because the streak of humanity at their core is a facet often missing from these more abstract adventure/horror games that tend to lay on the "woe is me" stuff without delving into the pain of these sympathetic antagonists in a more relatable fashion, but as it is Ashina: The Red Witch is a perfectly acceptable if not particularly remarkable classic-styled adventure game in a busy Indie market that's becoming harder than ever to stand out in. Also, it's been a real long while since I've seen a game (or any type of media) with this many habitual smokers in it. Feels almost nostalgic, in a way.

Rating: 3 out of 5.