Ikai Review

We all love a good scare sometimes. I personally love the idea of sitting in a dark room, playing something terrifying, and getting a good thrill out of it, that’s why I was so excited when I read about Ikai. This psychological horror was horrifying, just in a way that I hadn’t actually wished for.

Ikai is a first-person psychological horror game that heavily takes inspiration from Japanese folklore and sees you assume the role of Naoko, a young priestess tasked with protecting a shrine from various evil spirits and yokai. Sadly, this is about as strong as the game’s story gets, with it being told mostly through notes found in-game as well as short sections of [terrible] narration given by Naoko herself.

The gameplay is rather simple; you will be exploring a linear area solving puzzles, collecting items, and avoiding demons. There is no combat, so Naoko’s only defence is to run, crouch, and hide making it rather monotonous at times. This gameplay loop does get boring pretty quickly and the act of looking through drawers and cupboards feels as exhausting as it is awkward. Not to mention that the act of getting caught by demons and monsters that are stalking you is infuriating since some of them have no telltale signs that they are close by, resulting in you getting jump-scared and having to restart from your last checkpoint.

The puzzles you will encounter and be tasked with completing in Ikai can be both rewarding and infuriating. Some will require a little bit of clever thought to figure out but that’s very few and far between. The majority of them are either way too simple, or insanely difficult in the way that you would never ever think of the solution without a quick Google search.

Where Ikai succeeds is through its building of suspense and atmosphere, because let’s face it, no horror game is going to do well without that. The game does a good job of creating a chilling ambience mostly through its use of good sound design; creaking floorboards, mysterious banging, and unexplained whispers help to prepare for whatever spookiness you’re going to come up against next.

Unfortunately, the visuals don’t come across as well as the game’s audio. Ikai looks okay, average at best, but that’s not the problem. The game suffers from numerous issues such as texture pop-in, which makes loading in just a little more frustrating. Not only are the loading times a little longer than I would like, but you then also have to wait another few seconds for textures to load in too. On top of this, the game’s resolution is extremely low resulting in a consistently poor frame rate whether you are playing in handheld mode or docked.

The game’s controls, as simple as they are, feel quite sluggish. Walking at your normal speed feels incredibly slow but sprinting feels abnormally quick, making chases quite awkward. Not only that but the act of opening doors, drawers, and cupboards in a timely manner was tricky, to say the least. It just seemed rather heavy. Ikai also sees you physically drawing seals onto paper using a paintbrush which – as interesting as it seemed at first – was not only difficult to do quickly whilst being chased, but it also doesn’t feel natural or smooth.

The next thing I am going to touch upon is both a blessing and a curse, and that is the overall length of Ikai. It comes in at around 2-3 hours, depending on how you play through it, which as I said was both bad and good. Bad because I do not believe that any game that dubs itself as a phycological horror should be so short, because how can you develop an intriguing story as well as fun gameplay within that time? But it was good because frankly, I simply didn’t enjoy my time spent playing it.

One of the biggest difficulties the game has is simply knowing what to do, or where to go, and this became apparent from the very beginning. Tasked with the job of sweeping the shrine and then taking the dirty washing to the river sounds simple enough, but with no map or waypoints, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Nothing really stands out as being an object of interest, nothing was shining with a golden glow, and that continues throughout the rest of the game.

Ikai does have some collectibles you can… well, collect. These are in the form of papers and drawings that will provide you with a little bit of information regarding feudal Japan, and the cultures and monsters you will encounter, which I did enjoy learning about as I haven’t had much experience regarding this but am intrigued by it. It helps to break up the repetitive gameplay a little and offers something else to focus on aside from where to run to next.

I love a good horror game, but sadly Ikai just didn’t do it for me. It made me more annoyed than scared, and I struggle to recommend a game that is not only ridiculously short but also one that I couldn’t get to grips with myself. Put the graphical issues aside, this one just doesn’t provide any real depth.