I’ll be upfront, the main reason I chose to play Kowai Shashin was because of the rumors of it being “haunted”. Now obviously that’s not true, the rumors are false, but a game with a history like this will always intrigue me, and push me to play them. There’s also a sort of novelty with older horror games, there’s a specific style that modern horror games can’t properly emulate. And I’m so glad there already is a fan translation of Kowai Shashin, so that it not only allows me to understand how to play the game, but to experience the story as well.
Its tough to really judge this game’s gameplay. Everything surrounding the gameplay is really nice, but the gameplay is just a long chain of QTEs, and nothing else. As you get to the later chapters as well, they become ridiculously fast, and you have little time to figure out which button you need to press to react. This gets noticeably tough at the final boss, where some of the QTEs appear for may just a second. However while the gameplay is lackluster, the general vibes of the game are immaculate. Having to scan through cursed photographs, and find anomalies in order to exorcise them is such a unique vibe. It helps that while some of the photo anomalies are obvious, there’s also some rather freaky things that are seen throughout the game. The droning ambience, and the sound design is easily one of the best aspects of the game. In general, this game has a really strong atmosphere, that I think is able to help supplement the overall game.
The story wasn’t entirely clear to me, though I could see some of it having been from the fan translation, I’m unsure. However the concepts there were really interesting. Sometimes the gameplay is just meant to space out the parts of the story, however as the story goes on, the ghosts you have to exorcise do feel like they tie into the story of the main character. The final chapter is where the story is most spelled out to you, and I do think it’s really interesting. There’s this whole idea of “devouring souls” as a way of exorcising them which is a really interesting way of doing things. I’ve maybe only ever seen one other thing that has done something like that before.
Ultimately this game is a rather short experience, being only about 2 Hours in length, and because of that it never overstays its welcome. It’s a rather unique experience thanks to the atmosphere and having to scan haunted photos, though the QTEs do become really frustrating. I think it’s worthwhile to try and endure all of the QTEs if you can because of how unique this game is. Though if you can’t handle them, there’s a modified versions of the game that helps make the QTEs more tolerable if you need. While this game is definitely far from perfect, I’m kind of enamored by it because of how intriguing it is to me.
