Terrors

Among horror film enthusiasts, there is a sub-culture of those who feel that VHS tapes were the best media format for the genre. The grainy image quality and artifacts are seen as enhancing the experience by distorting what the viewer can see and adding to the fear of the unknown. Horror filmmakers have themselves taken advantage of lo-fi recording, particularly within the found footage horror genre, in which cheap cameras are often used to reduce visual fidelity. In the world of horror video games, this sub-culture is not as large. Sure, there is the odd Silent Hill fan who insists the primitive graphics of the first game gave it an uncanny, horrific edge that later games could not match, but lo-fi horror video game culture is nowhere near as widespread as it is in film. If such a culture were to develop, Terrors would likely have a cult following as one of the most extreme examples of lo-fi horror.

Released in the summer of 1999, Terrors was the first game in Bandai's "Novel Theater" series, which was their equivalent term for "Sound Novel", the latter being copyright of Chunsoft. The mid-90s had already seen countless sound novels on the Super Famicom, Saturn, and Playstation, but had yet to make a splash on handheld gaming systems. The WonderSwan was primely position to become the handheld home for this style of game, thanks to its remarkably strong support for kanji display as well as digitized images and audio. The technology was respectable for the time, but not without its limitations. The system's 224x144 monochrome screen could only display 8 shades of grey at a time, drastically reducing the detail of digitized images. Furthermore, the poor quality screen needs to be held up to the light at just the right angle for images to be clearly distinguishable. Audio needed to be heavily compressed to fit on cartridges. These limitations wound up being the perfect recipe for horror, as they allowed the little handheld console to effortlessly distort real photographs and sounds until they became uncanny or even unrecognizable, allowing our imaginations to fill in lost details with our unconscious fears.

Terrors is played in the WonderSwan's vertical mode. Most of the time, the top 2/5 of the screen display an image while the bottom 3/5 are used for text display, but sometimes images are briefly displayed in full-screen for maximum impact. Like other novel games, the gameplay amounts to reading text and selecting options which branch the story in different directions. There are five scenarios to play through at the start, each by a different writer, featuring completely different characters, setting, and story. They may be selected in any order and boast a combined total of more than 40 endings. After reading through each scenario once, a final sixth scenario is unlocked. The ending of this scenario depends on which endings you got in the other five. An interesting feature of the game is the "Terror Point" system. As you proceed through the branching paths of a scenario, encountering situations which scare the protagonist accumulates points. Usually when this happens, a wave effect appears on screen, but the actual tally of terror points is hidden. At certain times in the story, your current number of terror points will put you on a particular branch, and having too many points may cause the protagonist to act of his or her own volition instead of following your choices, due to fear taking over. It's a creative way of accounting for the cumulative actions that have been taken throughout a scenario. For completionists, this makes it very difficult to view every ending, as simply selecting options you have not chosen before may not necessarily result in a different ending if the cumulative terror points are too many or too few.

A mix of digitized photographs and pixel art are used for images. Some photos are altered digitally for better visual presentation or for special effects, exemplified in a certain scene involving mirrors in the haunted amusement house scenario. These techniques, combined with the limitations of the hardware, effectively blur the lines between realism and artistic representation. Even the inside of a protagonist's home appears unsettling through this warped lens. On the corner of the game's box is a small message recommending the use of headphones while playing. There was even a special edition released which included a headphone adapter. Since I don't have a headphone adapter, I played with audio coming through the system itself. There is partial voice acting, which sounds heavily compressed and often barely intelligible. The WonderSwan's crappy speaker often can't handle the voices and produces a garbled, crackling mess. There is an option to turn off voice acting, but I left it on as I felt the distorted voices added to the creepy atmosphere, especially the shrieks and screams. Much of the audio is environmental sounds, like cicadas chirping, footsteps, the protagonist's heartbeat, and so forth. Composed music is also used for some scenes, including ambient and suspenseful tracks.

Despite its strengths in visuals and audio, Terrors is ultimately held back by its writing. Most of the five main scenarios are generic, predictable horror stories. They are relatively short and tend to quickly jump from one scene to the next without enough time for the atmosphere of a scene to sink in and create dread within the reader. This structure arguably works well within the 小さなお化け屋敷 (small haunted amusement house) scenario, since it consists of exploring a series of rooms with different attractions, but in most scenarios I felt scenes were progressing too quickly to be engrossing. The most memorable scenario of the five was きしむ音 (creaking sound), which is about a young man who discovers he is actually a well-made karakuri puppet built by his grandfather. What's more, his body has a mechanism that will self-destruct if anyone else finds out he is a puppet. He resolves to study his grandfather's research to understand his plight while hiding the truth from his girlfriend. It's a far-fetched premise, but one that results in some interesting internal dilemmas for the protagonist and stands out from the other generic stories. The sixth and final scenario is a surreal, dreamlike story with no context for the events taking place. This was my favourite of the bunch, as I'm fond of dreams and stories that leave much to the reader's interpretation.

A selling point of Terrors was that it featured idols performing the voice acting. Trading cards featuring pictures of the idols were included in the special edition package. The stars are as follows: 大森玲子 [Reiko Oomori], 中島礼香 [Reika Nakajima], 原史奈 [Fumina Hara], and 佐々木円香 [Madoka Sasaki]. Also appearing are 鈴木尚子 [Naoko Suzuki], 小村美佳 [Mika Komura], 小山真未 (Mami Koyama), and 木村江美子 [Emiko Kimura]. The characters they play in the game have the same given name as the idols, with the exception of Naoko for some reason. Reiko Oomori also sang the ending theme, 追伸 (Tsuishin), which plays during the credits after completing the sixth scenario. The song is completely incomprehensible through the WonderSwan's speaker, a perfectly fitting end to this distinctly lo-fi game.

While I cannot recommend it on the strength of its writing alone, Terrors will undoubtedly please a particular niche audience who value distortion in horror. It's a game that is virtually impossible to replicate today, given how the dated hardware itself plays such a fundamental role in the experience. Squinting at the monochrome screen while a distorted shriek crackles out of the speaker is something that can't be easily replaced. I don't know whether lo-fi horror games will ever gain the cult following that films have, but Terrors lies patiently waiting to be rediscovered on that day.