The stats
If you're reading this, I've already been haunted to death. Sorry, it was nice knowing you all but after playing actual haunted game Kowai Shashin I'm now a blast-processed skeleton.
Just don't ask how I'm posting this review post haunting-death. It's spookier that way.
Kowai Shashin came on my radar after being redeemed by Zell_La_Belle - a late release PlayStation game with it's own attributed lore. Coming out in 2002, it garnered it's own little ghost story as it features real digitised photos with added ghosts. Now these ghosts are just people's pictures with some generous usage of the smear tool to put them at weird angles but I can see how the active imaginations of teenagers in the early 2000s could take it a bit too far.
The game itself is actually a very simple setup - we play as Hiori, orphaned exorcist who has the unique yet family-inherited ability to exorcise spirits from photographs. This fourteen year old (goddammit) makes a living from this, and every stage of the game is established with a letter. After reading the letter with appropriately spooky music, you are shown the requisite haunted photgraph.
While straightforward, the gameplay is where things start going wrong. It can be broken up into three major parts:
Once you've got your proton pack ready and you are ready to bust, the game darkens the picture and you do battle with the ghost as it rushes towards you - appearing in each cardinal direction and with each direction matching to a face button on your PlayStation controller. This part doesn't drain your health, at least - but if you don't manage to hit the ghost to push it back before it appears roughly 5 times, you do get hit with no recourse.
I found this mode the worst to deal with - maybe it's due to playing on an emulator or being an old man, but I felt the timing required was unfair at times. As established through multiple retries, there's no set pattern to learn, the ghosts appear via RNG with different ghosts having different patterns. For example, the hanging woman ghost will only appear on the left or right, while the fetus ghost (yes, that's right) does a fast-fast-fast-slow-slow pattern. The speedier enemies feel truly unfair, with your talisman/spell/what have you passing through the ghost if your timing is off by even a little. As the game gets harder closer to the end, you can write off an exorcism attempt if you get hit too many times in this section. And you will get hit in this section, no-hit attempts for me were vanishingly rare, especially with the faster ghosts of Chapter 7 onward.
Upon hitting the ghost enough times you are then able to seal it away - this leads to a 9 stage QTE where you need to enter the correct inputs within a tight time limit to complete the sealing. At first you only need to successfully complete 2 of the 9 stages but as the chapters progress so do the amount of stages you need to complete. Ghosts in the endgame require you to hit all 9 stages correctly or you're taken back to the shooting screen for more punishment.
To be fair to the game this type of QTE can be fun to settle into, getting a good flow happening as in the normal mode the buttons are the same every time. This is where streaming the game reduces your enjoyment a bit as you need to concentrate on the QTEs, and streaming, paying attention to chat and potentially getting bombarded with sound alerts are all contrary to that and certainly not the game's fault.
What is the game's fault, though, is the healing mechanic. The only possible way to regain health is via sealing the ghosts - but through my playthrough this again seems to be set by RNG. Sometimes you do get a full heal, which is welcome, but others you get the minimum amount of health back which is then immediately gone as soon as you activate the talisman for the next ghost. When you're struggling in the later chapters this can feel like a kick in the teeth to make progress that is immediately ripped away by the game's very own mechanics.But what are you struggling with all these mechanics for? There is a somewhat compelling ghost story taking place here - while a lot of the different photos and their backstories are completely independent, Hiori provides an arc to the story with her exorcism reviews and a plot dealing with her past and how exorcising ghosts is giving her a strange power... and a strange hunger. I won't spoil it here but I felt it was worth playing through to see where the plot ends up.
You don't even need to grapple with that if you like, though, as in an amazing touch you get three discs of Kowai Shashin - the normal disc, the random disc and the visual novel disc. Normal has the gameplay as described above - whereas random ups the cruelty factor by making the sealing QTEs completely random, upping the difficulty factor in an already tough game. However I should give Kowai Shashin a bonus point (or should this bonus point go to the fan translators?) for including the Visual Novel disc. Rather than putting you in something that looks like Tokemeki Memorial, it's the same game but you have unlimited health, the shooter section only requires one or two hits and every single QTE just requires pressing X over and over. An impressively accessible addtion that can help people experience the story without quick reflexes. You just don't get retro achievements for this mode!
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In Summary: despite offering a somewhat compelling plot Kowai Shashin's frankly anti-player attitude costs it a lot of points. It's weird that I would actually recommend it to people who like a spooky story, but not for it's gameplay. I only completed the one playthrough but I may go back and do the other two playthroughs off stream just to see if the ending changes. At around 6 hours to complete it's hard to say do not try this game at all, and the Visual Novel mode makes it available to practically anyone. Just maybe don't stream it with a rambunctious chat happening!
Final Score: 2 out of 5