Simple 2000 Series Vol. 113: The Tairyou Jigoku (PS2)

 This is yet another game that's been on my radar a long, long time, and that I'm finally able to play thanks to fan translators. (The translation actually came out quite some time ago, but I'm also very bad at keeping on top of things like this). It's a weird and original horror game, it's in the Simple 2000 series, and it's from Tamsoft, so of course I was interested in it. The title, I believe, translates to "The Overwhelming Hell", which is pretty appropriate, as it stars a teenage girl with poor posture, who's having an incredibly unpleasant time.

 

One night, she's leaving school a little later than usual, so it's dark and no-one else is around, when she remembers she left her phone in the classroom! She goes back, only to catch the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland stealing her phone and running away through a portal. The portal leads to a forest, and that's where all the unpleasantness starts. The forest, like all the places the rabbit takes you (I've gotten as far as just after the third boss, and can tell you that the second and third stages take place in a sewer and a castle, respectively), is infested with swarnms of bugs and frogs and other unpleasant creatures. Each stage then has her running around finding notes left by the rabbit, and eventually grabbing the rabbit himself, to make him drop a key for the room where that stage's boss lies in wait.

 

Unusually for a horror game, you don't have a health meter. Instead, if the gross things get close enough to you, they'll start crawling all over you, and a visual representation of the noises the protgonist is making as they do so. If you don't shake them off quick enough (by frantically wiggling the analogue sticks), she'll get so grossed out that she dies. You can pre-emptively stop them from getting on you, too: you can jump on them to squash them, or you can hit them with one of the various weapons you find lying around each of which is swung in a different way, and also eventually breaks.

 

 The bosses are a little more interesting. The first one is killed just by running up to it and hitting it a bunch of times, but the second and third bosses are a lot sillier. The second has you hitting bugs that crawl along the ground towards you at it with a golf club, and the third has you hitting flying bugs at it with a baseball bat! As for more traditional survival horror-type stuff, you mgiht be disappointed to learn that the game really only pays lip service towards it: there really no puzzles beyond wandering around hoping you happen to find a key or the rabbit, who will also be holding a key. The fact that there's no health also simplifies things beyond what some people might like: the character calms down shortly after all the things have stopped crawling on her, so there's no long-term management of your health or recovery items. And though the weapons are breakable, tthat takes a pretty long time to happen, and there's plenty of them lying around.

 

The Tairyou Jigoku is a pretty good game. It's a lot more atmospheric than you might expect from a twenty-year-old budget game, and the kind of fear it invokes is pretty different to that of most horror games: rather than the fear of a violent death, it's the fear of being lost and alone in a cold, damp place at night, while a ton of horrible, unsanitary creatures want to touch and crawl all over you. It's definitely worth playing, and I'm very glad it got translated so more of us can do so.

Blue Angelo: Angels from the Shrine (GP32)

 The GP32 was, as far as I know, the first emulator handheld, and having owned one during its heyday, it was very exciting. Streets of Rage 2 looked incredible on its 320x240 LCD screen, even without a backlight! It also had a bunch of games commercially released for it, on pre-written Smart Media cards. However, I couldn't afford any of them, and as far as I could tell, no-one was dumping the ROMs back then, either, so for decades, I was completely
unable to play them, because though the games were eventually dumped, the only GP32 emulator was pretty useless, only offering gameplay in the form of a silent, slow slideshow. But on a whim, I recently did a youtube search for "GP32", to see if the modern fashion for emulator handhelds had revived interest in their Korean forebear. Some of the videos showed full speed gameplay, with sound, which was pretty exciting, and a little more research led to an actual, functioning GP32 emulator! It's on android and you have to pay for it, but it's better than nothing.

 

So, I then spent a few hours dipping toes into various GP32 games, and some of them will be reviewed here in time. But the one that really hooked me is the console's final commercial release, Blue Angelo: Angels from the Shrine. It's a very GBA-looking metrovania, in which you control a mouthless, telepathic blue angel exploring a post-human, demon-infested planet in the distant future. There was actually an attempted kickstarter for PC and GBA ports in 2016, but it unfortunately failed. Anyway, Blue Angelo isn't as fully-featured as the GBA Castlevaniae that were its contemporaries, but it's clear that this was a result of being made by a much smaller team on a much smaller budget, rather than an indictment of the abilities of the dev team or the host hardware.

 

Your blue guy is arms with a staff, and as well as your normal beat em up-style combo, and your jumping and crouching attacks, there's also a few special moves performed with fighting game-style inputs. The only one I've consistently figured out is a very useful throwing of the stick, performed with a half-circle motion. I know there's at least one other move that I performed by accident once, where your guy spins in place attacking, but I haven't figured out how to replicate it. There aren't any other weapons to find, though there are pieces of jewellery hidden in specific places that can be equipped for stat upgrades, and you also level up by defeating enemies.

 

Exploration is fine. The pause menu teases a bunch of new abilities: super jump, double jump, and so on, but after a couple of hours of play, all the accessing of new areas has been done via coloured keystones that open doors that match their colours. There's also some multi-coloured doors, that presumably open when you have all of the stones. One thing worth mentioning is that save points are the only way to restore your HP, and they're pretty far apart, so venturing into uncharted territory always feels like a dangerous feat of endurance. It can sometimes be a little frustrating
, but I think more importantly, it negates the feeling that a lot of games in this genre can evoke after a couple of hours, where the player is listlessly swanning back and forth through rooms full of enemies who can barely scracth them. It really feels like you're in dangerous territory, and makes every discovery of a new save point a lot more exciting.

 

I think the real draw for Blue Angelo, though, is how it looks. Not only is it full of great pixel art, for the sprites and for the backgrounds. More importantly, what that pixel art depicts is really great, too. The backgrounds often look like the surreal vistas seen on the covers of sci-fi books from the 1970s, while a lot of the enemies are demons and giants reminiscent of renaissance art. It's an interesting combination that works well, and the incongruity really helps the impression of the game taking place in a world without humans, distant in both space and time. It adds to the aforementioned satisfaction, too, as each new area means a new beautiful backdrop at which to gawk.

 

Blue Angelo is a great game, and it's a shame it's trapped on ancient, somewhat rare hardware. Of course, you can now play it via emulation, but it'd be nice if it someday did get an official rerelease of some kind so the devs can get the payday they deserve. Until then, though, metrovania fans should seek it out, and enjoy a previously inaccessible genre entry that has a lot to offer. The one caveat I would place on the recommendation is that it's definitely not safe for people with photo-sensitive epilepsy, as levelling up provokes one of the most violent full-screen flashing effects I've ever seen.