In which qureate decides to try their hand at doing a horror game, with decidedly non-terrible results.
This game follows three girls—Nana, Mio, and Azusa—who do a horror stream of exploring an abandoned and almost certainly haunted we're-not-gonna-outright-say-it's-a-love-hotel-for-the-sake-of-ratings-but-it's-totally-a-love-hotel1 in pursuit of the most noble goal of getting more viewers. Naturally, it goes wrong instantly when Mio gets separated from the other two, who also split up equally quickly, and winds up chased by an animate and extremely murderous mascot costume from the nearby defunct theme park. The three must then run for their lives while figuring out how the hell they're going to get out of the hotel. It's not exactly a complex plot, and the characters aren't particularly complex either, but it gets the job done at least.
So, how does qureate make a game out of this premise? Well, it's a side-scrolling graphical adventure. You need to go around the hotel, collecting everything that isn't nailed down and on fire, solving puzzles, and incidentally also trying not to get murdered by the killer mascot that's running around. That last bit's the main wrinkle here, and the vast majority of encounters with the mascot are non-scripted—he'll show up at random to disrupt your exploration, forcing you to run and hide whenever it does. It's an effective enough jumpscare the first couple of times it happens, but as is the nature of such things it winds up getting tedious after a while when you're backtracking across the hotel for the millionth time and you're suddenly forced to turn around and find the nearest bathroom to cower in. Fortunately your opponent is extremely easy to escape from, having absolutely no ability to sniff out your hiding places even if you hide right in front of him. Though there are absolutely no safeguards against him just teleporting into a room in a position where he blocks your only exit.
For the most part you're dealing with adventure game-type "figure out what the right item to use for this situation is" puzzles, which are simple enough especially since this is not a game that is particularly interested in making you reuse items. Which leads to a very good "this gun exists solely to shoot out a single lock and cannot be used for anything else"-type moment at one point, I have to say. Really, though, it's probably for the best that the puzzles are usually intuitive, since a lot of them are timed. There are some actual puzzle-type puzzles later on, though, which aren't too devious but are effective enough. And the way you get onto the true ending path is some genuine Adventure Game Logic of the highest caliber.
Naturally, since this is qureate and we should not be under any illusions about what kind of developer we're dealing with here, there's plenty of fanservice to go around. This isn't one of their actual eroge offerings so it doesn't go much farther than extremely and sometimes improbably flattering camera angles plus the occasional suggestive situation, but we do get plenty of that, including a panty shot every time you hide in a bathroom2. It's not as ludicrously gratuitous as Prison Princess where you wind up seeing panties more or less constantly, but it's still more than a little silly.
Ultimately, though, Livestream: Escape from Hotel Izanami actually does manage to get some decent scares in. It knows how to build suspense, its bad endings do their job for the most part, and it understands how to make gory situations work without actually showing the gore itself. It's hardly the scariest thing out there or anything, but it gets a passing grade on that at least.
Alas, like everything qureate makes, this game is weighed down by the dread incompetence of Medibang. It's a decent showing by their standards, though, which is to say it calls armchairs sofas and insists on calling the murder-suicide case much of the backstory is built around a "forced double suicide" but there is clear character voice and general consistency.
I'll probably end up forgetting this game quickly enough, but it did its job. And sometimes that's all you really need out of a game
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The nature of the place doesn't really come into play beyond set dressing, honestly
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You can also hide behind pillars, which obviously doesn't provide that particular result