Yuoni a new release from Tricore, a digital content production company based in Fukuoka, Japan.
Heavily marketed around the concept of sunset... Sunset Stained, Sunset Kissed... We get it... There's a lot of orange and red in the color palette!
So what's it all about??
You play the part of Ai, a 10 year old school girl in 1990s Japan.
So this instantly rules out weilding an arsenal of automatic weapons, upgrade paths to deadly takedowns and hadouken style special attacks; leaving you feeling..... vulnerable!? Exactly what this game is aiming for.
Forced to play children’s games in a world of never-ending dusk, Ai is hunted by otherworldly entities as her life hangs in the balance. When these horrors begin to bleed into the real world, Ai must accept that she has only three choices: hide, run, or die.
Essentially this equates to navigating the halls of an "empty" school at sunset in order to find a doll and bring it back to a bucket of water.....as you do in 90s Japan.
Along the way Ai will encounter various dangerous spirits that she must avoid.
Some detect her via her breath, others are blind and can only pinpoint her by sound. She must use their weaknesses to her advantage to escape to the safety of the bucket!
Each level, or section, pushes the narrative a little further along and we learn more about the scenario and the spirits, in all honesty it is quite an interesting story.
Each level is essentially a maze you must navigate to find the doll, followed by an anxiety fueled sprint back the way you came.
As each level gets progressively longer and the environment is very similar looking, this quickly rampd up the difficulty, especially if like me, you have an atrocious sense of direction.
The game does well in building a feeling of tension and unsettling atmosphere, but not terrifying. There are jump scares which personally I hate (they just make me angry).
I reviewed the game on Xbox series X, I found the graphics and audio to be perfectly suited to the task at hand and the engine chugged along nicely with no discernible frame rate drops or issues.
Yuoni showcases a nice and somewhat original idea, with some interesting lore. Although the game only takes 4 or 5 hours to complete, the repetitive nature of the gameplay loop and assets does start to cause a little fatigue around the 3 hour mark.
Yuoni is $21.99, well worth it if you're a horror fan, but maybe wait for a sale if you're on the fence.
It's a decent game, well executed but with very limited replayability and probably not something you'd revisit once you finished.
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