Okaeri (

2019

) ½

Let’s not mince words: Okaeri barely qualifies as a video game. It is short even when compared to the rest of Chilla Art’s oeuvre, clocking in at well under half an hour to play through from start to finish. It’s a rare case where a game sports a $3 price tag and still feels like it’s charging an exorbitant fee! Moreover, it’s not like what little there is in Okaeri is particularly ground-breaking or even all that interesting. It’s very much the standard First-Person horror game that indie developers have been shitting out by the thousand ever since Silent Hills’ Playable Trailer came out in 2014. Indeed, it’s a good deal more primitive than most of its admittedly rudimentary rivals, boasting a single puzzle that is little more than a glorified scavenger hunt. Hell, the bulk of my playtime was spent just finding my character’s house on the walk home from school!

The player takes on the role of the titular character, Okaeri a Japanese middle school student who returns home from school to find her mother has committed suicide. She then goes into the woods and follows mommy dearest’s example by hanging herself in a ruined shrine. Then the screen turns black and the player is left with the unsettling noise of Okaeri’s noose swinging in the breeze. This last bit is without a doubt the game’s best moment, made all the more effective by the fact I couldn’t even exit out of the game, I just had to sit there. Indeed, the only way to close the game was to open up the task manager and do a force quit. Now, that’s what I call immersive!

The basic narrative framework of one suicide following another is perfectly fine. It exemplifies the tragic fatalism that has served as a fine basis for many horror stories. What’s missing from Okaeri is an attempt at developing this premise into something deeper and more complex. This is not a full game, it’s a proof of concept. Indeed, it’s frustrating that so little was done with this premise because the bones of this story could make for an excellent little horror story: The player could take control not of Okaeri but her confused ghost, gradually living out the routine of her final day in the weeks, months, and even years following her suicide. She would be trapped in a loop, repeating the same trauma again and again as the world goes by around her. Indeed, at first, I thought the game was going in this direction because upon starting the game Okaeri confesses that she doesn’t know the way home, implying the world has changed so much that she can no longer recognize it.

Taking this approach to the story would give the player a mystery to solve in the form of “what happened to my character” and “why am I repeating the same events again and again” that could help us get invested in the game. Once that was figured out there are places for us to go from there, we could try to find a way to break out of the cycle and attain some form of peace. Sure this story has been done before (and extremely well at that just take a look at Higurashi When They Cry) but I’m always quick to say that originality is overrated. At the very least changing the story to this would give the player goals and objectives beyond simply “go home” and “open the locked door” and make this game into something approaching a real story rather than a loose sequence of events.

However, I cannot simply point to the execution Okaeri and say that it is entirely devoid of charm, rudimentary as that execution may be. Like all Chilla’s Art games, the visuals are superb and deeply disturbing. Even when you turn off the film grain that makes everything look like the opening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) from a bootleg VHS, the game’s atmosphere oozes a sense of undeniable dread. Even mundane objects take on a sickly quality that makes it seem like we are not so much in a representation of our own world, but an alternate dimension just different enough as to create a pervasive feeling of unease. Even the mere act of walking through the unfamiliar streets at the beginning is deeply unsettling for reasons that are hard to articulate.

Visually, the game is the perfect balance between the realism of contemporary graphics and the grotesque distortions of late PS1 and early PS2 visuals. Chilla’s faces are, as always, excellent examples of lo-fi monstrosities that frighten not because they are monstrous but because they are just short of normal. Many of the props in the environment are, sadly, less impressively creepy, looking utterly mundane more often than not. Even when the unassuming living room furniture appears on the ceiling it’s still just unassuming living room furniture.

At this point, this is the fifth Chilla’s Art game I’ve played and the third that I’ve reviewed and still, the high point of his career remains the first one I played: Convivence Store [2020]. I’m set to give Chilla one more chance to redeem himself, possibly with Hanako [2020] which looks rather promising given the fact that it is considerably longer and more involved than the average Chilla game, before writing him off entirely for the next couple of years while he gets his shit together. I wish him the best but I can’t tolerate any more of this wasted potential.