Upon seeing the screenshots of this game, and apparently not bothering to read the description, I bought it assuming it was a more horror-themed Kikikaikai-style shooting game. Other than each starring a young female exorcist, however, the two games have almost nothing in common! What Deep Shinonome: Yin Yang Maiden (which is the name it's given in the Switch's UI, while Shinonome Abyss: The Maiden Exorcist is what's on the title screen)actually is is a stage-based survival horror game, centered largely around your character's physical vulnerability, and the management of extremely tightly limited resources.
Each stage is a building, represented by a grid of (mostly) square rooms connected by doors. Some rooms will have torches or firepits, some will be traps: a spike pit surrounded by only a thin ledge, for example, some will have nothing, not even a light source. And of course, there's items to pick up in some of them. Sound is just as important as vision, though, as you can hear monsters in adjacent rooms, and can make noise yourself to attract their attention.
This is essential, since though you have a gun, ammunition is incredibly scarce, and really, it's only effective against the weakest monsters. But the monsters aren't particularly intelligent, and you can lure the corporeal ones into firepits and other traps to destroy themselves, and the spiritual ones through sealed doors or into shrines for similar effects. There's other, single-use weapons found lying around, too, like shurikens that can kill most monsters in a single hit, and grenades, that can clear out entire adjacent rooms.
Though you're an exorcist, your aim in each stage is only to enter through the front door, and eventually exit through the back. You don't have to destroy every monster lurking therein, though if you don't you'll be spending a lot of time avoiding them, and as well as weak and fragile, you're also pretty slow, so that's a difficult act to keep up for an extended period. So the meat of the game is surveying the situation very carefully, figuring out which monsters are where, and also where the resources needed to destroy them are.
Of course, this means that it's heavily structured around playing stages repeatedly. Not only so you can get the lay of the land enough to actually complete them, but there's also a strong emphasis on scoring, with a complex rundown at the end of each stage, showing the points you scored for item use, destroying monsters, and finishing quickly. That doesn't mean they've skimped on the size of the game, though: there's a ton of stages, starting out moderately difficult, and judging by the star scale used on the selection screen, gradually moving up to inconceivable difficulty for superhuman genius players.
I like this game! It's compellingly addictive, to the point where I don't want to leave a stage I've started unfinished, trying over and over until I figure it out (and successfully eecute that solution), then often foolishly starting the next stage straight away and getting drawn in for another series of failed runs. It also definitely works as a piece of horror, being atmospheric and gruesome with relatively simple graphics and sound, and tying the horror into the mechanical design of the game itself, rather than just being a macabre skin draped over a generic action game. Definitely recommended. (Note: a lot of places online seem to have the game listed as a roguelike, but that's just an optional sidemode, the main game is a series of specifically designed and balanced stages).
No comments:
Post a Comment