The Japanese and the genre of horror are a volatile mixture of horrifying and epic storytelling. Look at movies like ‘The Grudge’ and ‘The Ring’, or even games like ‘Silent Hill’ and ‘Fatal Frame’; they have an uncanny ability to create media that twists urban legends into a dance of fear and intrigue.

Unfortunately, ‘Tatari’, a game created by Hidden Tower Studios, is one of the first-person horror games that does not do this as well as I thought it would.

You play as an inquisitive detective in rural Japan on a case to unravel the mystery of a missing person from a campsite in a mysterious and eerie forest. His plan is to stay at the same campsite as the missing victims, but it doesn’t take long for the case to take a dark turn, though.

Your investigation takes you on a strange and spooky journey through a few different locations filled with mystery, cryptic clues, and jump scares. which borders on boring, the story itself didn’t capture in any way, and felt somewhat thrown together and lacked any real drive to follow it.

The game offers you mystery, horror, puzzles, jump scares, and good old Japanese folklore, but in a very quick progression. While the game does have its qualities, it does lack quite a lot in a few departments. Hidden doors, combination locks, and miniature Japanese puzzle boxes are just some of the very simple challenges you will come across.

While they are fun, I found them mostly rudimentary and was left unsatisfied once completed. Each puzzle, each hidden door you find, keeps the game flowing, using a hammer to break a lock, a key to unlock a door, so you can progress step by step to a nearby area to investigate.

Visually, Tatari is a sea of poorly reused assets over and over and a lack of direction or any sense of one while playing can leave the player feeling silly and lost. While some NPCs looked like something from the likes of ‘Phasmophobia, the art style was simple and left a lot to be desired; open, empty spaces or bland rooms are what you will mostly find.

It leans heavily on, of course, Japanese style with dark overtones set at night to spook you! But really just makes you feel like you have just booted up a game from the past, leaving me very unimpressed with what should be a spine-tingling ambience.

Mix this with either not enough music to make the skin crawl or the over-the-top jump scare sounds that just hurt the ears; it just isn’t a pleasant time. Most of what you hear are your own footsteps, and the music failed to set the mood with the minimal, eerie atmospheric sounds heard overpowered by gameplay.

Any music that was played before, after, and during jump scares and cut scenes was an attempt to scare the player with loud shrieks and soft, eerie music that fails to set a mood and leaves your ears ringing. It does not add to the experience at all, but in fact does the exact opposite.

While fun, this game could have done better with its sound effects to add a more ambient feeling without sharp, cheap jump sounds. The limited assets, over and over again, do not help the overall experience. The music, the environment, and the story all failed to grab this player’s attention or ability to want more.

It feels like you must have prior knowledge of Japanese folklore to grasp it all better, but having to search up outside the game to understand something, the game failed to do any solid storytelling. I found myself mostly waiting for the end like a corny horror movie from the 80s.

Written by: Matiyus