As if school wasn’t a horror enough…
…Iru! Is a Japanese first-person horror adventure game released in 1998 for the PS1. That’s a quirk of the English language, isn’t it? “first-person horror adventure game”, you wouldn’t say “adventure first-person horror” or “first-person adventure horror”, it doesn’t read right. It’s like how a big green dragon is fine, but a green big dragon doesn’t sound natural. But hey, now I am getting distracted by the minutiae of the English language. So, let’s get further sidetracked by Japanese language! …Iru! does have a translation available, which I am grateful for, as my Japanese is incredibly rusty these days. Of note, even the title was translated to “… They’re here,” which, contextually, works quite well as a translation; it has an ominous “They live” vibe.
So, language digressions aside, let’s talk about the game. …Iru! is a horror adventure game set in a high school, because schools themselves are terrifying places, even more so at night. Our protagonist, Inaba, is helping set up his classroom for the upcoming culture festival, which, based on what we see in the classroom, appears to be a Takoyaki stand. He wakes up after an ominous dream involving a young girl being chased into a chapel, who gives us an ominous warning that something bad might be going down, and when the moon vanishes, everything will go to hell. Having seemingly fallen asleep on the floor, he is chastised by his classmate, Yuma, and you get back to trying to get the room finished for tomorrow’s festival. At this point, we get to get a feel for the controls of …Iru! and it works, it feels a bit floaty and cumbersome, but for the time it was probably quite a normal way to play a first-person perspective on the PlayStation 1. We do get dedicated strafe buttons, which is always something I like to have (it makes performing SR40 possible, wait, that’s Doom), but we also have the L2 and R2 buttons adjust your Y-Axis, and even after playing the game for about 6 hours I still find this a little unintuitive and press the wrong buttons.
The starting act of the game sets up the ebb and flow of the game much better than I was expecting and also gives us a decent amount of time with some of the NPCs, we get to know about how Hirose is a caricature of a fat person, Hikawa is an awful person, Ms Houjo is suspicious and that not everything is as it seems. The entire set-up feels a bit like a slasher film from the 80s, a group of characters are disconnected from the outside world, and we get a chance to dislike them before something inevitably bad happens to them. What I meant by the ebb and flow of the game, without prior knowledge, you’ll be bumbling about trying to find out which NPC you need to talk to or what event you need to stumble in on. Sometimes you are given a bit of a steer, but I felt myself frequently just running around, hoping to encounter some dialogue or be given an item that would help me progress. Eventually, we get into the meat and potatoes of everything, as tension slowly starts to bubble, the school experiences a power cut, and you know that is when everything will hit the fan.
So, I don’t want to get too much into the story, as I think it is something best experienced, either through playing it yourself or through a rather comprehensive Let’s Play (Not a shameless plug at all!). I should note that you it would also be good to go in blind, even if the bumbling about can be a little frustrating and can make things seem a little disjointed, but the game is relatively short, even if my first playthrough did clock in at about 4 hours, my second one was probably closer to 2. …Iru! features two core routes, and you can seemingly jump back and forth on them a little bit. I assume that depending on which route you were prominently on will make a minor difference to the ending, of which there are strictly speaking four of them: a bad ending, two worst endings and a true ending. Seeing as the bad ending and true ending are effectively the same regardless of which route you take, your mileage on replaying this game might be limited. Personally, I really enjoyed my 2nd run of this game as the events I encountered were very different and put a different vibe to one of the characters. That being said, I think my first run had me bounce between the routes a little bit, which probably didn’t help with laying out the cleanest narrative, but there were still some clear plot points to follow regardless of this. Ultimately, though, the story is pretty good, there is enough intrigue to keep you going and featuring some predictable twists and turns if you are familiar with the tropes of the genre.
Being trendy before its time or more likely taking inspiration from games like Clock Tower, …Iru! leaves you defenceless and has you hiding from would-be, killers and utilising some basic puzzle solving to overcome obstacles. “Chases” are scripted, so they happen at set times in the story and the solution is typically quite simple; in fact, the game will indicate when you interact with things if you can use them to hide “in a pinch”. Unlike Clock Tower, however, when you are being chased, you will automatically go to a nearby room where you can hide, which means there are several mentioned “in a pinch” hiding places you won’t use. I mean, truth be told, Clock Tower’s chases are also scripted, to a certain extent, you just have a bit more freedom in where you choose to hide. This means that outside of these story beats, you are, by and large, safe from danger whilst exploring, even though, theoretically, there are things out there stalking the corridors. This being said, the relative safety that you have could be contrasted with a game like “White Day: A Labyrinth named School”, which has stealth elements that can prove to be frustrating as you constantly go back and forth to hiding places to avoid capture/death. I think the illusion of danger that there is something about wandering the corridors keeps you on an appropriate amount of edge, at least for that first playthrough.
Something I haven’t touched on, is the overall presentation of the game. In my opinion, this game looks fantastic. Now admittedly, I play pretty much all my Retro Games via emulation,, and I am not tech-savvy enough to know what is going on to make old games probably look better than they would have on official hardware, on an old CRT, plugged in with composite cables. What I can say about the game, though, is that I like the aesthetic. PS1 horror is an aesthetic that seems to be widely loved; this is evident by the number of indie games that utilise this style. Character models look decent to me, and whilst some of them do look a little derpy at times, and the less we say about Hirose’s walk cycle, the better. Sometimes, finding items can be a little challenging at times; things like keys tend to have a little glint that shows up in the darkness, but some other items can elude you at times. Another part of the game’s presentation I want to touch on is how there are plenty of unnecessary spaces ranges from bathrooms, locker rooms, classrooms, and plenty of locked doors that remain locked throughout the game. Half of those locations do not even have events that take place in them. I actually quite like this, the game world of …Iru! feels, by and large, like it could be a familiar space, a real place, a real high school somewhere in Japan with a layout that feels out of someone’s childhood. The basketball hoop on the roof terrace by the observatory is probably the only thing that came across as wildly out of place, beyond the more obvious, sinister things.
Personally, I found a lot to enjoy here, the atmosphere that …Iru! Captures is quite solid; the mystery and the intrigue kept my attention throughout, though I must admit, there was a plot point I had totally forgotten about by the end of the game, but by that point I was more concerned about the perils the final act had introduced. The puzzles in the game aren’t too complicated, you won’t have to reach for the moon for the logic to solve them, you won’t be picking up hundreds of items to shove into your inventory, and there is only one item in the game that is “useless”. The music can be a little grating at times, but that is because I spent way too long trying to figure out where I was going and listening to the same loop over and over again. The opening act can be a little slow, and depending on the kind of person you are, you might find this incredibly frustrating, or you might be like me and find yourself getting a little sucked into the mild dramas of some of the characters. It was unfair to say that the opening act gives you reason to dislike the characters; there are only a couple of them who come across as terrible people who deserve comeuppance. If you enjoy slower-paced horror experiences, like Clock Tower, I genuinely believe you will have a good time with this, definitely a game to crack out in the evening and sit there in a dark room to play!
My let's play of ....Iru! Is available here.
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