The Convenience Store (

2020

) ½

I have never worked a menial job on the graveyard shift, so I can’t speak from experience about this but I’ve got to imagine that it has to be pretty creepy. All the more so if you are the only employee working there, as you’ll be mostly alone for the entire night, with your imagination amplifying every odd noise or strange occurrence into something deeply unsettling. The only people you’re likely to see the whole time are whatever oddballs are out wandering the streets at 3:00 am. Maybe it’s different in big cities like New York or London that stay bustling until sun-up, but in a small city like the one I live in (and the one that this game takes place in) the only people out at that time are drunks, lunatics, and the homeless. Moreover, an empty Convenience Store is in-and-of-itself a bit of a spooky place with its harsh fluorescent lights and mass-produced design. The sheer banality of the surroundings combined with the solitude of the lonely night gives the whole thing a tinge of David Lynch style surrealism. Kudos must go to developer Chilla’s Art for discovering and exploiting this unique horror setting, one can only play so many games set in haunted hospitals/schools/houses before they begin to get stale.

The game begins innocently enough, with the player character waking up at around midnight to begin a shift at the nearby convenience store. You get dressed for work, make yourself dinner, and grab your flashlight before heading out. There is a whole little town rendered between your house and the convivence store, which in places looks like a quaint Japanese village and in other spots resembles a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Huge concrete walls rise up next to modest little houses. It’s difficult to say, given your limited interaction with this setting, just what is going on in this world. Indeed, since you never see the town by daylight it's impossible to say that it’s not just a normal small town with one or two odd features exaggerated by the gloomy shadows.

At the store you will invariably be left some task by your manager, either restocking the shelves, throwing away expired food or exterminating pests in the back alley behind the shop. In addition, you’ll also have to deal with the occasional customer who visits the shop. They are mostly just harmless folks picking something up in the middle of the night, but there is the occasional jerk (the kind of guy who will make you bring him five individual beers from the refrigerator) sprinkled in among them. All this keeps the game from getting too slow and uneventful during the first half or so when the tension is still slowly ratcheting up. It’s a good solution to the usual problem that plagues walking simulator horror games like Gone Home [2013] and Layers of Fear [2016], where they quickly get boring in-between the spooky moments. I always had something to do while playing The Convenience Store, though it did lead to a few bizarre moments where I would catch a glimpse of a spooky ghost only to immediately go back and restock the shelves like nothing happened. From an outside perspective, it must have looked like my character was simply in denial about the supernatural phenomena taking place in the store around them.

When I say the scares are on a slow boil, I mean a really slow boil, like the kind that a frog wouldn’t notice until it’s too late. For the first night, all that happens is the door glitches out and starts to open when seemingly nobody is there. This is a bit unnerving because up until this point you’ve been relying on the chiming the door makes when it opens to tell you when a new customer comes in. However, at the end of the day, it is just a door chiming. Indeed, this is such a non-issue that it’s even dismissed by your manager the next night who tells you there was an issue with the door’s wiring and he’s had an electrician fix is during the day shift. Aside from the door, the only thing of note that happens is a delivery man drops off a weird video cassette with some grainy, ambient images on it. Indeed, for the half of the game the only real jump-scare happens when your manager sneaks up on you while you’re punching in and shouts “boo.”

Graphically, the game lands in a sweet spot between ultra-realistic modern visuals and grotesque early 3D graphics. It captures all the oddity and often disturbing images of the late PlayStation 1/early PlayStation 2 horror games (like Silent Hill [1999]) while never looking goofy. The environments are very realistic but the people are much rougher looking in a way that is deeply off-putting. Even the characters who are “normal” still have a faintly monstrous appearance and the ghosts, when they finally show up, are truly revolting. The characters a definitely animated by Chilla’s Art, as they are unlike anything I’ve seen floating around, however, I’m less sure about the background objects. Some, no doubt, had to be custom designed for the game but I would imagine that many of them are pre-rendered assets, as there is just way too much stuff here to have all been modeled by a single artist. Especially not one who releases multiple short games a year as Chilla does. Given that it’s hard to say whether the unique visual design was intentional or not, but whatever the case it is effective and interesting.

This game is short. I struggled with a couple of puzzles and even I managed to beat it once in well under two hours. If they were trying to pass this off for $20 like some games (ahem, Gone Home [2013], ahem) I’d pitch a fit. Fortunately, it's priced to match its short length (I got my copy for about as much as I would spend on an individual-sized bag of potato chips) so I can’t really complain much. Indeed, it costs as much to rent a good horror movie on Amazon or iTunes, so the price seems eminently fair. Moreover, the fact that the game is so short means that there is precious little filler or repetition. New creepy occurrences happen each in-game night, steadily building in intensity and horror until the whole store becomes a living nightmare. The nightly commute from your house to the convenience store is the only times where the game begins to repeat itself, and once you learn the way to walk the whole thing will only take you half a minute so that is hardly an issue.

The controls are what you would expect, though I take some issue with the run button. It is customary in games that have a run button that holding it down actually makes your character moves faster, but here the increase in speed is so minimal that you might as well not bother. I don’t know what character I’m playing, but seriously she needs to either hit the gym or ditch the depleted uranium slippers she’s wearing. There’s no reason to run (well, other than to get to the shop a bit faster and cut down on the commute), as this is not the sort of horror game where you will be running and hiding from the monsters so this issue is only a minor quibble.

Evaluating a horror game is tricky because not everyone reacts the same to images and moments that are meant to terrify. For example, this game gave me a couple of good jolts during my play-through and a few moments of thrilling unease but otherwise left me nonplussed. My wife, on the other hand, who was watching over my shoulder, was so scared by it she could barely sleep that night. In several scenes, she covered her eyes and demanded that I describe what was happening onscreen to her. How much you’re scared by The Convenience Store will likely depend on how scared you get when watching Japanese horror movies. If Ju-on: The Curse (2000) has you waking up in cold sweats and sleeping with the lights on then I figure this game will have a similar effect on you. If you find yourself only mildly perturbed by such films, then the effect of The Convenience Store will probably match that.

The game has two endings, one “Good” and the other “Bad.” Naturally, you wind up a victim of the vengeful ghost in the bad ending and escape in the good one. However, I would strongly recommend the “Bad” ending over the “Good” one. The “Good” ending sees every detail of the mystery laid bare in a text dump. Here you’ll learn that before the convenience store was built there was a house on that plot of land with a family of three (soon to be four) living in it. One day, the father killed his pregnant wife, murdered his son, and finally killed himself. Not only is this hardly the most organic was to reveal the mystery, those who have seen it will instantly recognize that this is the same premise at Ju-on: The Grudge (2002), with the added detail of a new structure being built on the haunted house after the fact. No effort whatsoever is made to explain the videotapes that keep popping up throughout the game, so I can only assume that they were just there to call back to Ringu (1998). That and the idea of haunted VHS is an inherently believable and spooky thing; there’s a reason why nobody has ever tried to make a movie about a haunted DVD or laserdisc.

The text dump ending left me distinctly disappointed. Of course, all mysteries are more interesting than their solutions and most wind up being letdowns when the infinite possibilities of the riddle collapse into the one, underwhelming solution. However, in the case of The Convenience Store, it was a double letdown because in addition to being a lame conclusion it also revealed the game to be just a rip-off of the two most popular J-horror movies (Ju-on: The Grudge (2002) and Ringu (1998)) from the late 1990s/early 2000s. It doesn’t help that the long text dump at the end displays the translator’s limited understanding of English. There are no typos or mistakes, mind you, but the overall sentence structure could be improved and simplified to a great extent to make it clearer and more effective. If you’re playing through The Convenience Store, do yourself a favor and go for the mistitled “bad” ending. That keeps the mystery a mystery and also includes a parting image that, while not exactly original, is downright chilling.