Still, despite these flaws, the sense of perpetual tension both games maintain throughout makes them worth a try for ardent lovers of all things unsettling.Returning home in the evening after taking your dog Poro for a walk, your sister notices that the pooch is missing and takes it upon herself to search for it. When coupled with a difficulty curve that’s abnormally steep, even for a horror game, and you’ll find greater worth in a cast-iron resolve than a resistance to jump scares and lurking monster encounters.
Yes, that sense of building dread is always there thanks to that minimalist approach to sound design and the darkened nature of each street, but after a couple of hours of dying endlessly until you’ve determined the best route/solution, you start to feel far more frustrated than fearful. This results in a painful reliance on trial and error that continues for the majority of both games. While some enemies can be bypassed, outrun or distracted, too many are aggressive enough to pose a considerable danger - which usually means a one-hit death and a respawn back at a previous checkpoint. Unfortunately, that extended length for the sequel shines a revealing light on some of the key issues at the heart of Yomawari’s limited gameplay loop. Night Alone is quite short at around three hours or so long, while Midnight Shadows clocks in at about twice that. It’s here this Yomawari duo are at their most powerful and engaging, with the occasional jump scare keeping you on your toes as you try and find your dog/sister/friend. It soon becomes apparent in both Night Alone and Midnight Shadows that not all of these nightmarish beings are necessarily a threat, but a set of wild things wandering in the dark. When the stamina bar at the bottom of the screen pulses red and your heartbeat quickens, it means you’ll need to quickly conceal yourself.
With almost no soundtrack to speak of in either game, you’ll have to rely on the gradual rise and fall of your own virtual heartbeat as your means of divining any approaching dangers. You can’t fight the creatures you encounter - most of which are based, like most horror games from the East, on the rich tapestry of Japanese folklore - so instead you’ll need to use the environment to hide from them. From then on, both Night Alone and Midnight Shadows follow much of the same formula as they plunge you into a nightmarish world of familiar Japanese urban sprawls and brooding forests, only with monsters of various kinds lurking around every corner.
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