…Has easily succeeded at scaring the crap out of me, and i’ve only got about an hour and fifteen minutes or so of gameplay. I saw the game at gamestop for $10 the other day and just had to get it, been wanting to play it for a while now and was never able to find a copy of it.

Needless to say, playing this alone, in the dark, at 1am is probably good conditions for a minor heart attack. There’s been more then one occasion where I’ve been using the camera to look around in 1st person, looked somewhere, then somewhere else, and turned back to the original spot only to have something along the lines of this staring me right in the face. Yea, I shat a brick.

The gameplay does a really good job of making the whole atmosphere really keep you on edge; specifically the camera angles. They always seem to be the kind of birds-eye/’Something’s watching you’ type of shots, and you’re always expecting something to jump out at you. However, the appearance of some of the enemies don’t always seem to be the same. One time I ran into some ghost chick in a film projector room, and when I came back again(Power surge owned the xbox before I could save) she was in a closet across the hall, hiding in a basket case type thing. You’ll never know where *all* the enemies are going to show up, but a good deal of them do seem to be preset though.

The whole Camera-exorcism type of ‘combat’ is kind of lame though. It’d be much better if ghosts died in one or two photo’s, but did more damage and gave you less time to react. Having most of them show up and just stand there, and having you take 5 pictures to kill them, while waiting for the camera to reload to take the next picture in between, is kind of unexciting. The game isn’t exactly focused on combat, so it’s not a complaint, I just think they tried a little too hard on it.

Storyline wise, the game is great. Trapped in a village that’s disconnected from the outside world, in a different dimension or whatnot, kind of gives the feeling of purgatory, being trapped between this world and the afterworld, etc. You and your sister also apparently resemble twin shrine maidens that were involved in the ritual that destroyed the town way back when. Reincarnation, rituals, cults, shrine maidens, sealed-off worlds, all seem to be generally classic Japanese horror elements, all well crafted into the game. I don’t wanna rant about the story though; this isn’t a review, I’m still playing this damn thing because i can’t play for more then 20 minutes without being scared shitless.

All in all though, i’m happy I got it, seems like it’ll be a fun little time burner to keep me horrified entertained.