Published: Square Enix

Developer: Epics

Release Date: 07/03/2008

Available Exclusively On

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Have you ever wondered if a haunted video game exists? These permeate Japanese folk tales and were popular during the 8-bit era of consoles and computers before the internet was a widespread phenomenon. You play as a friend of a daughter whose father is a video game developer. You unravel a murder mystery involving a haunted DS game and a fractured video game development studio. It’s an interesting meta view on the terrible world of stressful video game development. I don’t want to get too involved discussing the story, as what little is here is very short, running at about 3 hours in total.

There are 7 days before the haunted game turns you into a statue. You initially investigate the disappearance of your best friend’s boyfriend, but eventually, you stumble upon the cursed TS game. Yes, for obvious reasons; the DS is called the TS in the game. This game is a 16-bit RPG title that reflects the real world. When you hear your TS jingle (it’s the startup sound for the DS), you will pull up what looks like a simulated DS home screen and play this 16-bit game. It’s not an RPG in this game. It’s just a single town that you walk around in and talk to people to trigger events. The music and graphics are glitched out and creepy, and it helps give off a good atmosphere. You don’t enter this mode but maybe once per chapter for just a few short minutes. Each day is started with a visual novel type of dialogue, as the majority of the game is held in book mode. I love games that use this feature, but there’s no option to flip the DS for left-handed people. The TS RPG style game is played in regular mode, so you are frequently flipping the DS back and forth.

The meat of the game is the walking simulator-style touch screen-based exploring. It’s pretty bad, and my hands cramped constantly (at least using the DSi XL). There’s no option to just use auto-run all the time. The character walks at a doggedly slow speed and one that’s not practical for running away from ghosts. You need to hold the stylus in the center of the screen to run and turn faster. While doing this, you are holding down the D-pad and rolling your thumb around to strafe. This control scheme is fine, but I would prefer to use either the stylus for movement or just the D-pad. There’s little interaction with the environments outside of picking up key items and opening doors. You will be opening many doors and backtracking through many mazes. A lot of these have to be navigated in a specific order to avoid the ghosts that roam the hallways. These ghosts aren’t very scary. They’re slow and plodding and they just have black eyes and gaping black holes for mouths.

Despite the title being a horror game, there aren’t many scary moments. While the ghosts aren’t scary, there are a few jump scares that worked early on, but after day three, the game kind of gives up the horror part and focuses more on the murder mystery. The characters are meaningless, as the game is so short we can’t get to really know anyone. Every one has generic anime tropes to them, and by the end of the game there’s not much to care about. While the mystery is solved and has an actual ending, I didn’t care about anything in between. While the levels are great-looking on a technical level, they are void of detail. I liked the Silent Hill “Otherworld”-looking areas in the hospital, but these are just plain empty hallways with an occasional chair or desk. You can’t interact with anything to encourage world-building. The goal is to just open doors and get to the next cut scene.

While Nanashi no Game isn’t a good horror title or walking simulator, it’s short enough for a fun afternoon of the occasional creep-out. The music is pretty haunting, and there is tension in the game, and it uses the DS hardware well and in interesting ways. Just don’t expect anything really crazy here. If the controls were better, or at least customizable, the game would be more forgiving on that part as well.

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