Tamashii (

2019

) ½

Indie games have been mining technical errors and glitches for horror for quite some time now. From Doki Doki Literature Club [2017] with the way its save files “corrupted” after you reached certain points in the story, to Axiom Verge [2015] where you can use weapons to glitch out enemies and turn them into a mass of discordant pixels. Part of this may be a deliberate attempt on the part of the developers to evoke famous unsettling video game glitches like the manimals of Red Dead Redemption [2010]. However, this is not what makes these glitches so scary. A game, no matter how disturbing or unsettling, can never really affect the player. The worse thing that a game could do is be a well-disguised virus that bricks your computer. This is the primal fear that all that “glitchy” horror exploits, not the fear that if you die in the game you'll die in real life.

Tamshii exploits this fear better than most. In addition to moments where the game “breaks” and the sprites are replaced with glitched out versions of themselves or your character clips through the wall, there is also a pervasive feeling of wrongness throughout the game. The graphics flash and fizzle, and the images around the edge of the screen are distorted as if viewed on an old CRT monitor. Now if I played it the Nintendo Switch, or the PS4, or even the Steam version this impact would probably be a good deal lessened. Those are all platforms that I've used for years, and I would be genuinely surprised to discover a virus disguised as a game on them, even a relatively obscure indie title like Tamashii. Fortunately for my experience, I got it from itch.io as part of their bundle to end racism. I had never previously used itch.io, and indeed had only heard about it briefly when the site's owner boasted about how quick he'd be to ban games from the platform in response to steam's lenient policy on censorship. As a result, downloading a cursed looking .exe from an unknown platform had me more than a little concerned for what it was about to do to my PC. Of course, as it turns out itch.io is a perfectly trustworthy site, and my computer was not melted into slag.

If all Tamashii had up its sleeve was a few creepy-pasta computer glitches it would get old in about fifteen minutes. Fortunately, beyond mere glitches, the game is packed to the gills with surreal imagery that evokes all manner of twisted violence and sexuality. You have rooms where grotesque monsters are slamming into each other in a blatantly pornographic fashion. In some levels, there is a creature that looks like a dismembered pair of women's legs spread eagle with a face where the vagina should be, you've got bosses that look like mutated fetuses. It should be noted that most of the pixel art used to render these odious images is of the highest caliber... Indeed, there were times while playing that I wish it was a bit less detailed and skillfully executed. When compared to such monstrous sights, the rather generic-looking Cthulhu statues that dot the levels begin to look downright tame and lazy by way of comparison.

Now, it wouldn't be a 2010s horror game if it didn't load in a few jump scares to make you jerk around like a cat that's just seen a cucumber and Tamashii has more than it's fair share of those. Jump scares are a fun addition to a horror game or film, of course, though certain series have made a bad habit of building their entire product around suddenly showing you a spooky skeleton face. The jump scares in Tamashii are handled with a degree of grace that is unusual in the genre. They come infrequently, but when they do they hit like a truck first giving you a sudden flash of a disturbing image and then transforming the level in an even more grotesque and disturbing form, sort of like the nightmare world in Silent Hill

All in all, Tamshii is a master class in how to construct a disturbing low-fi horror game. Too bad all this dreadful atmosphere is undercut by the cartoonish noise your character makes whenever he jumps. I understand the need for an audio cue here, but does it really have to sound like a frightened cat farting into a tin can? A simple blip would have done the same trick and not undermined the overall experience quite so much.

The game's story is left deliberate obscure. You are a skull-faced kid that was created by a mysterious God to cleanse his temple of the corrupting influences that have befouled it. As you clear through the various daemons and monsters that have infested the place though you are contacted by the witch who is behind it all. She tells you that God is just using you and will unmake you as soon as your task is complete. In time, it's revealed that the corrupting influences are not daemons and abominations from hell, but a ruse put on by God's siblings. Apparently, God was from a polytheistic pantheon and was just pretending to be from a monotheistic one. The sibling deities have all agreed that their big brother has gotten too big for his britches and have endeavored to steal the older God's greatest creation right out from under his nose. That is where you come in, as the security around this creation is so tight only a being created by God himself could hope to penetrate through the defenses and tamper with it.

Tamashii is essentially a 2D puzzle platformer along the lines of Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey [1997], Heart of Darkness [1998], or Limbo [2010]. Each stage follows the same basic framework: Avoid a variety of instadeath obstacles and figure out the puzzle to open the door to the next room. Usually, this involves making a series of clones of yourself to hold down switches or activate magic runes. The puzzles are nothing special, indeed every one of the genre examples I mentioned above are more compelling on this front than Tamashii. The actual game part of this video game is mostly just busy work to keep you occupied while you enjoy the superb atmosphere. Oddly enough the part where the gameplay really shines in Tamashii is not in the puzzle sections but during the boss fights. This is odd because normally puzzle games fall apart when they feel obligated to include a boss stage because of the conventions of the medium. Here though the boss levels are fantastic. You're dodging attacks, dropping down clones on switches to damage the monster, and desperately trying to identify the boss' weak points. Each boss requires you to solve a simple puzzle while dodging his attacks, a formula that makes for some compelling moments of tension and joyous raptures of excitement when you figure out what you need to do. It doesn't hurt that the bosses are always visually interesting and strikingly grotesque.

By the very end though, it starts to seem like Vikintor, the game's developer, was sick of making a 2D puzzle platformer. The final boss battle takes the form of a side-scrolling space shooter with your, now winged, character battling it out with a monstrous fetus (I'm guessing that the developer has played Earthbound [1994] before). Presumably, the side-scrolling space shooter also bored the developer, because after the game ends you're transported into a Wolfenstein 3D [1992] style 3D maze where you can walk to the game's final scene. These additions, especially the sudden lurch to 3D are a bit jarring and don't really seem to fit with the rest of the game. They feel more like Vikintor wanted to fool around with a few different ideas than a natural continuation of the rest of the game he was actually making.

Evangelion's influence on Tamashii should be obvious, even if you're the sort who has never had a vigorous debate over who is the best waifu: Asuka, Rei, or Misato (It's Misato fight me IRL). If nothing else the high concentration of religious and grotesque sexual imagery should be something of a tip-off. Then there is the regular appearance of the Kabbalah Tree of Life, a symbol I, embarrassingly enough, only recognize because of The End of Evangelion (1997). Finally, the ending sequence where the game becomes Wolfenstein 3D [1992] for a few minutes has your viewpoint character descending into a massive cavern surrounded by a seemingly endless red sea dotted with crosses in a sequence that looks a hell of a lot like Terminal Dogma. Just like Evangelion, I really dig this game even if I'm not always sure what the hell is going on.