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| Title | Tokyo Dark –Remembrance– |
| Developer | Cherrymochi |
| Publisher | Square Enix |
| Release Date | Nov 7th, 2019 |
| Genre | Point-and-Click Adventure |
| Platform | Switch, Steam |
| Age Rating | M for Mature |
| Official Website | |
Tokyo Dark -Rememberance- is a point and click game for the Nintendo Switch, and an updated version of the Steam game Tokyo Dark with new art assets, endings, and other content. I never played the original, but I remember being interested in it when I first saw it. Now that I’ve finally been able to get my hands on it, how did it turn out?
I’ve got to say, the premise of the game completely lived up to the expectation I’d set for it already. Being a fan of both the horror and noir genres, a blending of the two sounded like a match made in heaven. Tokyo Dark -Rememberance- is about a detective named Itō, and her quest to find out about the weird mask that seemingly plagues anyone it touches. Including a girl named Reina, who seems to be the most affected. The story is by far the most interesting part of the game, the characters are very well written, to the point where I had a tough time figuring out what I should do. A lot of the time, it was a choice between morals and professionalism, and how it affects Itō and her outlook. The choices I had to make became increasingly more and more difficult the more I found out about certain characters. Even some of the one note characters have a lot of hard decisions surrounding them that affect Itō both physically and emotionally. This story feels lovingly crafted, and I loved every twist around the way. There’s also some comedy mixed in to offset all the horrible things. Like the cat cafe, which is absolutely my favorite part of the whole game.
The core mechanic of the game is point-and-click. You walk from place to place, talking to people and trying to find out more about your current predicament. Meanwhile you solve puzzles, which sadly are small and very sparse. This was one of the big letdowns for me, because I usually love seeing what new puzzles I’d have to solve. It’s a little strange to me when a genre staple is removed, but in all honesty the story makes up for it, so I didn’t notice it all that much. Other than that you also have your SPIN system to keep track of. That’s the main selling point of this game, but honestly it didn’t feel as intuitive as I feel like it could have been. The system measures your sanity, professionalism, investigation, and neurosis. To be fair, it does have some impact on the games and endings, but I never found it too hard to accidentally slip up. Investigation points are handed out like candy, and the others are fairly easy to get in check. You basically would have to purposefully mess with them, and when you do that you do get some clever content. I just wish it was a bit more intuitive to change, rather than something giving you one thing, but taking one away as well. It would have made for some interesting choices later on if a stat you needed was getting too low.
The only other thing that I have to talk about is the art and for the most part, it’s fine. I can’t really say it’s anything spectacular, but it gets the job done. Some of the faces seem a little weird to me, but it makes up for it with the backgrounds, and some interesting design choices. I remember this one scene you’re in a bar, and the people are all silhouettes. It’s a small touch, but drastically improved the game. There’s some good horror imagery too, like with the mask and the hallway full of doors midway through the game. If I had anything really negative to say it would be that the animations looked stiff and stuttered sometimes when running, but that’s a really small gripe in the big picture. The music is the same way, with it not being bad but not being anything to write home about.
I definitely recommend getting Tokyo Dark -Remembrance- on either Switch or the PS4 when it comes out later in 2020, or even the original version on Steam. The game is about $19.99 right now, which is a little bit steep, but I think you’ll enjoy it if you love either of the genres it’s a part of. I had a blast with the game, and managed to get about 6 hours out of the whole thing. Pick this up if you need a nice little horror/mystery game to go through
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Review copy provided by the publisher
