…Iru!

I completed …Iru! a few days ago, and if you follow me on Twitter you probably saw a rather large stream of complaints about it over the past few weeks. …Iru! is a hard game to play–it came out in 1998 and has aged really poorly. It wasn’t a great game to begin with either, but I am glad to have finished it if only to learn a little more about the design of better horror games. You can read my short review of this obscure title for now, and sometime soon I’ll put together a more substantial article about its main problems.

The images here come from an old post on Endaso’s blog. The name of this game is so generic that it’s impossible to search for, so thanks Endaso for the images.

7 thoughts on “…Iru!”

  1. I remember a thread about this game back on the forums. It was generally people getting stuck because it’s Japanese and there are no guides anywhere, so I don’t remember anyone’s thoughts on it.

    On an unrelated note, have you ever played any of the Ecco the Dolphin games? Specifically the 3D Dreamcast one, Defender of the Future.

    On the surface, it’s a happy cheery dolphin game, but it actually has a really unsettling atmosphere. The game gets dark pretty quickly. Many of the levels exude a really lonely, depressing and claustrophobic atmosphere, and the close fog due to the Dreamcast’s limitations acts like darkness (It looks fantastic too). You then have the tiny underwater caves, the constant pressure of maintaining your air and then the soul-crushing difficulty… it’s definitely very atmospheric and creepy. Not full horror, but it deserves a look.

    It’s worth it anyway for the fantastic art and music.

  2. Oh yeah, it was a simple but nice game 🙂
    I remember a forum member was working on the fan traslation!

    P.S. I’ve finally started Amnesia.
    WOOO so cool! It bringed me in memories old Hellnight good times :’)

  3. http://www.davebel.com
    Hey, I like to read your blog with Google Reader, but when you post images, it disables the hotlinking that Google does. Can you create an exception for Google domains so I can read it on Reader?

  4. I love this!

    I really appreciate the time and effort you have dedicated to this. Both in reviewing this game (and others) and in generally being able to actually see some good in the efforts. It wouldn’t be farfetched to see you become cynical and embittered after playing so many lackluster baked turds in this genre. But because of this, you’ve enlightened me to so many games I was unaware of back in the day and so my collection has been rounded out because of it. 🙂

    It would be kool to see footage or more images for this game. only 1 of the three images really shows anything, the other two are so small and so dark/simple it’s almost pointless to look at. Any chance you could someday get a photobucket account so you could post better images on the reviews for these games? Or.. any chance you’d let someone get one for you? If there was a way I’d let you sublet my account for your own album just to make it easy!

    Anyhow, thanks for this write up. Even though you said it was a brief one, and you’ll write something longer later, it gives off a lot of information.

    Just curious, if this is a japan only game, do you speak/read japanese or are you just going through it sort of blind?

  7. Just curious, if this is a japan only game, do you speak/read japanese or are you just going through it sort of blind?

    I speak Japanese, and while my reading is pretty poor I was able to get through …Iru!, mostly because it usually waits for player input before going to the next page of text.

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