The Haunted Hoard: Ikai (PS5)

The spirits of Japanese myth known as yokai seemingly contain just as many terrifying and dangerous creatures and characters as they do quirky and unusual ones, and in a horror game like Ikai, you’d expect them to only go for the most fearsome folkloric figures. Impressively though, Ikai includes a wide range of yokai from the obviously scary to the ones that would sound silly if described, and it manages to do this without fracturing its creepy atmosphere thanks to some intelligent presentation choices that remain faithful but show that context can really change how you perceive something.

 

The night of the yokai begins when the young priestess Naoko leaves the shrine to fetch water from the river. While navigating the forest though, she accidentally triggers a ritual, the shrine blanketed in darkness as cursed items and malevolent spirits spoil the sacred site. While this first-person horror experience at first seems to mostly be dealing with figures with some root in Japan’s supernatural history, there is a more personal element to the tale, not only because Naoko fears for her uncle, the head priest, but because the darkness seems to have a deeper connection to her own past that she’ll only discover as she cleanses the shrine more and more. Naoko’s dialogue is a bit unusual though, some odd word choices initially coming off perhaps as an attempt at being old-fashioned but eventually it just seems to be an unusual approach to sentence composition. You can usually understand what she means and most of her musings are coherent despite the oddly arranged vocabulary choices, but with the diligent articulation of the voice actress’s speech on top of it, it almost creates a seemingly unintentional characterization where she can’t help but express herself in an oddly proper manner. You’ll definitely be aware of the peculiarity of the sentence structuring, but it doesn’t undermine her personal plight since her observations are often short and focused on the matter at hand.

Ikai’s yokai are definitely the stars of the show though, and even before the game starts presenting them, it does one of its most effective tricks for seeding its interesting approach to horror. Pages with illustrations and descriptions of yokai are found around the game world as collectibles, and quite intelligently, some do tie to creatures you’ll encounter and some don’t. With the incredibly wide range of concepts yokai cover, you can read about something believably fearsome like an ogre or something seemingly mundane like living campfires that ignite and snuff themselves out as they please and you can’t be sure which one will appear in the adventure. In fact, sometimes you won’t even find the yokai page until after you’ve faced the creature, so you won’t always have a good idea what you might encounter in advance, leading to a continuous sense of mystery since nothing feels guaranteed. If you’re wondering how something like a campfire might be an impediment in a horror game though, that comes down to the obstacles and puzzles in your path. There are deadly fearsome figures who will grab you with a horrible shriek and kill you, but at other times the danger is simply navigating a space while avoiding a more mischievous yokai or figuring out how their presence may help you. It can be unclear whether a yokai even bears you ill will when you first spot it or if it can act at all, it easy for things to become tense once you notice something out of place or a new change to the shrine grounds that heralds the arrival of some threat you’re not sure you’ll understand.

 

Be they humanoid figures that wait to ambush you or monstrous creatures chasing you down, Ikai does mix up what you’re doing while you roaming around hunting for cursed items and the tools to purify them. One recurring idea are the spell tags Naoko needs to draw properly with her calligraphy brush to create seals not just on objects, but on doorways that furious creatures might be trying to break down. Writing out the symbol on the tag actually must be done by the player, but even though you must use the PlayStation 5’s control sticks to draw, the detection for a properly drawn symbol feels generous enough to account for some shakiness and a little smudging outside of the guiding lines. Never did I fail to draw a symbol properly, but at the same time, preciseness isn’t often the challenge during these segments. Naoko is often in peril when she needs to quickly settle down and create these spell tags, and since she needs to focus on them to make them properly, you can’t always know what’s going on around you. At times finding a safe spot is the challenge, at others it is making sure to react to any unusual stimuli to ensure nothing sneaks up on you, and again the uncertainty of how certain yokai will behave adds some nervousness to these segments that helps make these short sections surprisingly scary. If you do die, Ikai usually has a good sense for how far back to set you so it feels fair, and since the symbols do take time to draw, you can’t just blitz them and get past the tense situation without feeling some of that anxiety about your own safety.

Beyond the symbol drawing, there are longer segments where you’ll need to lurk around carefully or flee from the malevolent spirits who want you dead, and these can vary in efficacy. Exploring a dark cave maze does have a sense of uncertainty and danger without being too confusing, but oddly enough a section where you’re meant to sneak through the forest to avoid a yokai seems incredibly easy if you’re just a bit careful and yet the space is incredibly large, implying there was meant to be more danger. These sections are mostly effective, as are the the game’s many puzzles that are usually fairly good at providing interesting clues that connect to objects on hand. Naoko navigates her way to the river by reciting remembered clues to properly pick her path, a locked room contains conspicuous symbols and markings you need to learn the relationship between, and the creatures themselves can serve as clues at times. The game does get its hints a bit off though, Naoko sometimes too eager to nudge you towards the solution when the puzzle’s fairly easy but also she’ll leave you hanging on the rougher ones like a tile puzzle that relies on a different sort of logic from most of the game’s brain-teasers. You are thankfully given some segmentation between puzzles and moments where you’ll need to be running and hiding, the tougher ones giving you room to feel out your answers while simpler ones are often lined up alongside some peril. Ikai is pretty short on the whole though. Even if the game stumps you for a bit, you shouldn’t really be hitting four hours in total. However, this also means Ikai is moving forward to its new unknown dangers at a good pace, and while you cover the shrine grounds a few times, the excursions outside of it and the changes it undergoes due to supernatural phenomena means it still feels like you are finding something new as you make progress despite the game’s limited scope.

THE VERDICT: Good puzzle designs, tense situations, and properly balanced peril make Ikai a short but effective horror experience, especially once you factor in the intriguing handling of Japanese yokai. The uncertainty about what poses a threat and what might make an appearance makes the collectibles feel meaningful while also seeding doubt in the player’s head when the next encounter kicks off. There is usually some active threat, but is that spirit hostile, is it just set dressing, or might it play into some puzzle itself? The questions hanging over your actions help to keep you guessing as you progress and that nervousness is a sound source for fear, so while it does slip up in some areas like Naoko’s dialogue, this is still a quick and effective bit of folkloric horror that feels more faithful than games that plumb that history just for easy monster designs.

 

And so, I give Ikai for PlayStation 5…

A GOOD Rating. Little elements like the large but simple forest sneaking section or the tile puzzle’s design do feel like they threaten this short experience’s quality level a touch and there are clear points for refinement, but it manages its small size fairly well and while it would be neat to see every yokai you read about presented in this terrifying but accurate manner, the choices made do add a compelling sense of mystery to the game. A giant colorful head slamming down from tree tops sounds silly until you’re the one it might crush, and being unafraid to portray some stranger creatures also means that reading a collectible can be fearful in itself. When I picked up a sheet of paper speaking about a yokai who only seems to go around blowing out candles, I was more fearful about encountering it than some spider woman since I knew if the game did include it, it would find a way to make the section eerie or challenging to navigate. Considering how dark the shrine was already, it had even seeded a desire for light that made learning the game may have such a character in its back pocket effective. Again, there can be mild disappointment learning the game doesn’t go for featuring a yokai you read up on, but having a small selection of strange spirits beside the terrifying ones obfuscates what might happen going forward, and while you can count on some reliable elements like the symbol tracing, it thankfully never settles into one concept too long even if that does sometimes lead it down a less effective road for a bit.

 

Ikai is developer Endflame’s first video game and outside of voice work and the like, it was just a three person team working on the actual gameplay and presentation choices. The direction for what to include and how to include it is definitely what gives Ikai its special brand of horror, and while it’s not too hard to see a much larger game being generally more effective with this approach, Ikai makes it work within the means of the development team. A need for polish is not rare in indie horror, but a willingness to make the game a mix of ideas and a lack of fear in including stranger mythological creatures gives Ikai a much stronger identity than if it only plundered the familiar fearsome figures of Japanese folklore. While a good artistic representation of an obviously terrifying monster shouldn’t be looked down upon, it’s nice to have a game that can mix its horror with giant colorful heads bouncing around and living campfires that still fit cleanly into its eerie tone.