RE-REVIEW: Yomawari: Night Alone


Title	Yomawari: Night Alone
Developer	Nippon Ichi Software
Publisher	NIS America
Release Date	October 25, 2016
Genre	Survival Horror
Platform	Steam
Age Rating	Teen
Official Website

Recently I reviewed Yomawari: Night Alone, a great isometric 2D survival horror game by the good folks over at Nippon Ichi Software. Now thanks to the rising popularity of Steam being a fantastic home to many Japanese console and handheld games, we can now play Yomawari: Night Alone on our computers! After playing through the both the Vita and Steam releases, is the Steam port a quality release or is it broken?

One of the first things I decided to do upon booting up this version of Yomawari was to check to see what kind of PC settings there were in the options menu. While there are only 4 settings to tinker with, they do get the job done. The main thing you will likely want to adjust is the game’s resolution, and thankfully Yomawari supports a wide variety of resolutions. When in Window mode, changing the game resolution won’t really have much of a noticeable effect on the appearance of the game other than the size of the window. When in full screen, however, you’ll definitely want to select your monitor’s native resolution, as choosing anything below it gave me a really blurry and squished image that didn’t take up the entire screen. To say it looked bad would be an understatement.

In addition to the resolution settings, you’ll also have your typical display options for borderless windowed mode or just straight up windowed mode. The game refers to these options as “stretch” for borderless windowed, and “pillarbox” for windowed mode. There is also an option for VSync, which is something that I definitely appreciated because when playing Yomawari in full screen, I experienced some very severe screen tearing with the feature turned off.

Visually, the Steam port looks almost identical to the Vita version. That’s not a bad thing, as Yomawari is already a gorgeous game to look at. I really appreciated the resolution options available in this port, as well as being able to play it on my large computer monitor. I felt I was able to appreciate the game’s visual design a lot more on a larger screen, and everything looks very crisp. Of course, you could always play the game on the PlayStation TV as well if you have the Vita version.

As far as the controls go, you can either use the mouse and keyboard, the keyboard exclusively, or a gamepad. After trying out all three options, I would have to say definitely stick with the gamepad. The mouse controls are awkward, having you hold down left click and moving the mouse in the direction you want to advance. Since this game focuses largely on running away from threats, and needing to switch between running and tip toeing away from enemies, the mouse just felt like it didn’t give me full control. The keyboard doesn’t fare much better either. There are key binding options to make your own custom controls, but unfortunately you can’t use the mouse to move the flashlight around. You’ll need to assign all directions of the flashlight’s movements to keys on the keyboard, which just makes the entire control scheme feel awful, since you need to worry about both maneuvering around enemies as well as moving your flashlight around to actually be able to see them in the first place. Thankfully, my wireless Xbox 360 controller was recognized immediately and actually felt even better to me than playing it on the Vita!

Performance-wise, the game ran at a consistently smooth 60 frames per second on my PC, and I never experienced any crashes, audio issues, or framerate drops at all. The only issue that I ran into was that, occasionally when trying to pick up an item, the prompt wouldn’t activate. It only happened to me 4 or 5 times in my entire playthrough, but it’s something to be aware of as it can potentially get you killed when trying to pick up an item that has a lot of enemies around it.

Ultimately, the Steam port of Yomawari: Night Alone is a solid release that gave me only very minor issues that never really hurt my overall playing experience. I actually preferred this version of the game to the Vita version, and enjoyed the game even more after playing through it a second time on a much bigger screen. With the $19.99 price tag and a 4-5 hour play time, Yomawari: Night Alone is a great way to enjoy your Halloween this year!