What’s a creepy mansion without a locked door or 20?
When it comes to horror, less is often more. Something moving in the dark. A moan from the shadows. But in Chiyo, less just seems to be… well, less. The biggest challenge I faced in my time with this ghostly mystery was trying to find dead people to see, scary or otherwise.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the tension of a drawn-out spooky tease. I want to see an ominous silhouette at the end of a corridor, or a brief flash of something terrifying when I open a door covered in blood. But I do want to see something.
Yet Chiyo’s opening chapters were surprisingly light on the whole ‘haunted by the souls of the damned’ business, even when I tried to poke and prod the game into (un)deadly action. Oh no, what if my ghostbusting mystic happened to walk straight through this noise-making trap instead of crouching under it? Nothing. How about I make them pick up a mysterious item, or fiddle with something that’s probably cursed? Again, nothing. It was always nothing. I wanted to worry that the game’s supernaturally charged notice-o-vision would reveal a malevolent spirit was secretly breathing down my neck, or that investigating a decaying room might anger some violent fiend, but all I could find was one disappearing spirit and an invisible ghost rattling a door.
That door was locked by a wooden bar on the other side, and as this is a puzzle game I assumed it was something I had to leave alone until I found another way around and then move the bar myself, creating a handy shortcut through the game’s haunted mansion.
ALL ABOUT SNOOPING AROUND AND USING MY BRAIN TO SOLVE STRANGE PUZZLES
What actually happened was the door suddenly and silently unlocked itself after the ghost seemed to get bored and go away, about a minute after it had been wordlessly giving it a good shake.
RIP PUZZLES
And that was the moment my interest in solving the game’s puzzles vanished as quickly as a sunbathing vampire and never came back. The game’s all about snooping around and using my brain to solve strange puzzles: that’s not just all I’m personally here for, that’s pretty much the only thing my character can do. So
