Survival horror is one of those genres I dip into occasionally, partly because it offers a distinctive atmosphere that's a welcome change of pace from all the platformers and RPGs, and partly because I'm curious to see if anyone's innovated on the core mechanics that seem to be the bedrock of almost all survival horror games, which is to be ferried through a circuitous path to look for key items to unlock further progress. Yomawari: Night Alone is absolutely still that, but while it was a slow burn I found myself enjoying it more as I took the time to figure it out and build up the map a bit. An "Indie" game in the absolute loosest sense, Yomawari was actually developed and published by Nippon Ichi Software - who have made several inroads in the PC gaming marketplace over the past few years with their various strategy RPG (Disgaea, Phantom Brave) adaptations - and originally released on the Vita. However, it's not a particularly long game nor is it particularly sophisticated in the way AAA games tend to be: I'd put it in the same box as something as Team GrisGris's Corpse Party or Kikiyama's Yume Nikki: 2D sprite-based games with simple interfaces that nonetheless manage to do a lot with so little.

The plot of Yomawari is as follows: a young girl is taking her dog Poro home from a walk around dusk, but accidentally lets Poro loose into the woods surrounding their village home. Her older sister takes off to search for Poro, but after a few hours alone the younger sister decides to find her. The rest of the game takes place over the same night, as the younger sister looks for clues as to where Poro and her sister have gone, often inadvertently laying various spirits to rest in the process. The eerie nighttime of the village is home to all sorts of yokai and spirits, most of whom are hostile and will kill the girl whenever they find her. The player has to stay one step ahead, either by running past or avoiding detection. As well as a flashlight - keeping the light on means you can see more of the spooks, but that also means that they can see you - you can toss out distraction items like coins and rocks, hide in certain environmental fixtures like bushes and signposts, and while you lose stamina quickly by running when scared it's often the best and only way to survive. Most of the game revolves around exploring a new section of the map, encountering new spirit types and experimenting with how best to elude them, finding various objects scattered around - some are key, others are collectibles - and eventually locating the missing sister and dog. The map is impressively large and includes areas like a mountaintop park to the north, a closed shopping district and dilapidated factory to the south, and some dense woods to the east where Poro was last spotted. Puzzles are your standard J-horror survival type: sometimes the spirits want an item they've lost, or can be appeased or defeated with an appropriate offering. A human-faced dog in the schoolgrounds remains a tenacious foe until the girl feeds him an ominous bone found in the school's swimming pool.

The big strength of this game as far as I was concerned were the collectibles, which each carry their own little description and can appear in the girl's relatively safe home after each chapter, and the sheer variety of spirits to encounter. A lot of the spirits are deliberately vague, made of a mass of swirls or a basic shadowy human silhouette, but others have distinct and disquieting looks: a large creature that resembles a mass of hair and spider-legs with a jumble of facial features (seen above) often acts as a barricade to areas you're not meant to visit yet, and some of the quicker foes can cause a fright when they suddenly take pursuit from off-screen. There's a handful of friendly spirits, such as a mutilated little girl that will gift you the best distraction item in the game if you play tag with her for a while, but for the most part you're better off quickly moving through areas and keeping an eye out for places to hide.

As I said in the lede, the game took a while to sink its claws into me. Early on, when you have the barest sense of a map and very little direction, it can be overwhelming. The game checkpoints at jizo statues, but they tend to be few and far between and death comes swiftly and often. To the game's credit, you never lose item progress after dying, but it can sometimes be an ordeal just getting to where you need to go. Each of the game's chapters has a little set-piece area, and whether you're fighting a boss, trying to escape a recurring spook like the human-faced dog, or navigating a map filled with deadly monsters, there's usually a high difficulty bar and a lot of repetition before you get it right. Yet I felt myself getting better at the game the more I played, between learning how best to escape enemies with the tools at my disposal and filling in more of the map so I had a more concrete sense of the town's layout, and that helped mitigate a lot of the frustration around the false starts and frequent deaths. It's rare that you ever feel a sense of progress with a horror game, as they so often bat you around from one sudden development to the next in their single-minded goal to scare the bejeezus out of you for ten hours, and Yomawari: Night Alone at least bucks that trend somewhat as more of the map is filled in and you get ever closer to finding your missing family members. Still fairly run of the mill in terms of mechanics, but nonetheless one of the better and more imaginative horror games on Steam.

Rating: 4 out of 5.