These chilling survival horror games never experienced a Western release.
The Halloween season has come again, so it’s a great time to switch off the lights and fire up a good survival horror game for chills and thrills. Yet the problem is that a game can only be new once. Eventually, the dogs bursting through the windows in Resident Evil or Pyramid Head stalking James in Silent Hill 2 will feel run-of-the-mill rather than a shock.
There’s still indie horror, which can be hit or miss as many of them go for jump-scares rather than building fear. So, these desensitized players may like to scour the net for something more international. For example, these survival horror games came out in Japan but never reached the West. 8 Simple 2000 Series Vol. 113: The Tairyō Jigoku
The Simple 2000 Series was a series of low-budget games that are technically still around today, but they hit their peak in the 2000s when some of them actually got Western releases. Anyone who managed to play Zombie Vs Ambulance, Demolition Girl, or The Sister Swordfight (aka The Oneechanbara) played a Simple 2000 game. Many more didn’t make it westwards, like the surprisingly fun The Pro-Wrestling 2, and the less enjoyable The Tairyō Jigoku (The Overwhelming Hell).
Inspired by Alice in Wonderland, players control a schoolgirl who follows a white rabbit into a dark realm filled with bugs and other nasty creatures. On her own, she’s defenseless, but she can pick up different, perishable weapons like bats and clubs to hold back the hordes. It’s not spectacular, as it is meant to be a cheap game for quick chills. But it’s a must for people who like weird budget games. 7 …Iru!
If players want something a little more conventional, there’s Soft Machine’s …Iru! It’s a first-person survival horror where the player controls Tatsuya, an exchange student at Kirigaoka High School who has to help them prepare for their upcoming festival. Things start going wrong when he and the other students get locked in the building, and they start getting picked off individually by something (or things) lurking in the darkness.
The game plays similarly to Clock Tower, where Tatsuya can’t fight back directly against the terrors. He has to hide, run, and outwit the Lovecraftian beasts while talking to other survivors and solving puzzles to progress. The game’s surprisingly open-ended, as Tatsuya can explore to his heart’s content for one key item or another, though making them appear can be quite fiddly. 6 Devilman
People outside Japan are now more familiar with Go Nagai’s demonic antihero Akira Fudo thanks to its updated anime Devilman Crybaby.
