Editorials
[Best of 2018] Paratopic, SEPTEMBER 1999, and the Waiting Game
*Keep up with our ongoing end of the year coverage here*
You don’t have a gun.
And if you do happen to get your hands on a gun, good luck finding ammo for it.
And if you do find ammo for it, you will quickly run out as your enemy advances on you, undeterred by the slugs you plug in its inky black/oozy red/sickly green chest before your last spent shell clatters to the ground.
Horror games have often put the typical video game power fantasy —the player as a badass with ample artillery to kill anything that moves—squarely in their sights. In Outlast, Red Barrels excised combat like an overexposed stretch of film, swapping out guns in favor of a camcorder for a gory game of hide-and-seek. Until Dawn, P.T., and others have gone even further, offering the player nothing at all.
Even in more traditional survival horror games, like Prey and Resident Evil VII—games where you amass an arsenal of guns that would make a prepper blush—ammo is still scarce. Or, on the other hand, you may have access to a heaving pile of bullets, but no room in your inventory once you’ve made room for your potent assortment of stoplight-coded herbs.
While these games disempower the player to an extent, all of them ultimately allow you to control your forward progress. You don’t need to be good with a gun to make progress in Outlast, but you still need to develop basic skills. And if you do that— if you master the art of hide and sneak— you can control the rate at which you advance through the game.
But, two of 2018’s most talked about horror games rejected the notion that players should control their forward progress entirely. In SEPTEMBER 1999 and Paratopic, the ability to control the pacing is wrested from the player. Instead, a timer directs your fate.
Both Paratopic, from developer Arbitrary Metric, and SEPTEMBER 1999, from YouTuber/indie dev, 98DEMAKE, are “walking sims,” story-focused games that eschew combat or puzzles in favor of storytelling. While Paratopic’s narrative is as fuzzy as its 90s-inspired aesthetic, the game casts the player as three separate characters (not that you can tell from the first-person viewpoint) who are on the hunt for VHS tapes, that are very important for some reason. SEPTEMBER 1999 borrows the found footage graininess of horror films like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, trapping the player in two small, boarded-up rooms for a progressively gory evening.
As the games tell their eerie stories, they up the unease by skipping forward at their own rate. SEPTEMBER 1999 takes the same amount of time for every player: 5 minutes and thirty seconds. At various intervals, the tape skips forward; at various intervals, the room changes, getting bloodier. After the first or second shift, you’ll understand where the game is headed, but you have no agency to move the story to its ultimate conclusion. You can move between the rooms, or stand still, but you just have to sit with the uneasy feeling until the game reaches its ending as scheduled.
Paratopic uses the same trick. Implementing cinematic jump cuts in the same way that 2016’s Virginia and 2013’s Thirty Flights of Loving did, Paratopic uses sudden shifts to bounce the player through a variety of locations. An eerie drive with a mysterious briefcase riding shotgun. A grimy apartment complex. A gas station in the middle of nowhere. Paratopic moves the player from location to location unceremoniously, and it does so without warning. Often it takes far longer to change scenes than you might expect. Those driving scenes go on for an uneasily long stretch of time; long enough that your mind begins to wander; that you begin to wonder if you’ll ever get off this hellish stretch of highway.
You begin to wonder if you have any agency in this world. You may even do a quick Google search to see if the drive is supposed to go on this long—the interactive equivalent of asking “Are we there yet?” from the backseat. No response comes from the driver’s seat, but maybe you know the reply by heart anyway:
We’ll get there when we get there.
There was a moment in Japanese culture when writers and filmmakers began to update centuries-old fears so that they could still be effective storytelling tools in the modern world. One of the best examples of this is how extremely popular stories like Ringu and Parasite Eve began re-interpreting the cyclical nature of curses as pseudo-scientific “infections,” with this new take on J-Horror even making its way over to the world of video games in titles like Resident Evil (a sci-fi deconstruction of a classic haunted house yarn).
However, there is one survival horror game that is rarely brought up during discussions about interactive J-Horror despite being part of a franchise that helped to popularize Japanese genre cinema around the world. Naturally, that game is the Nintendo Wii exclusive Ju-On: The Grudge, a self-professed haunted house simulator that was mostly forgotten by horror fans and gamers alike despite being a legitimately creative experience devised by a true master of the craft. And with the title celebrating its 15th anniversary this year (and the Ju-On franchise its 25th), I think this is the perfect time to look back on what I believe to be an unfairly maligned J-Horror gem.
After dozens of sequels, spin-offs and crossovers, it’s hard to believe that the Ju-On franchise originally began as a pair of low-budget short films directed by Takashi Shimizu while he was still in film school. However, these humble origins are precisely why Shimizu remained dead-set on retaining creative control of his cinematic brainchild for as long as he could, with the filmmaker even going so far as to insist on directing the video game adaptation of his work alongside Feelplus’ Daisuke Fukugawa as a part of Ju-On’s 10th anniversary celebration.
Rather than forcing the franchise’s core concepts into a pre-existing survival-horror mold like some other licensed horror titles (such as the oddly action-packed Blair Witch trilogy), the developers decided that their game should be a “haunted house simulator” instead, with the team focusing more on slow-paced cinematic scares than the action-adventure elements that were popular at the time.
While there are rumors that this decision was reached due to Shimizu’s lack of industry experience (as well as the source material’s lack of shootable monsters like zombies and demons), several interviews suggest that Shimizu’s role during development wasn’t as megalomaniacal as the marketing initially suggested. In fact, the filmmaker’s input was mostly relegated to coming up with basic story ideas and advising the team on cut-scenes and how the antagonists should look and act. He also directed the game’s excellent live-action cut-scenes, which add even more legitimacy to the project.
The end result was a digital gauntlet of interactive jump-scares that put players in the shoes of the ill-fated Yamada family as they each explore different abandoned locations inspired by classic horror tropes (ranging from haunted hospitals to a mannequin factory and even the iconic Saeki house) in order to put an end to the titular curse that haunts them.
In gameplay terms, this means navigating five chapters of poorly lit haunts in first person while using the Wii-mote as a flashlight to fend off a series of increasingly spooky jump-scares through Dragon’s-Lair-like quick-time events – all the while collecting items, managing battery life and solving a few easy puzzles. There also some bizarre yet highly creative gameplay additions like a “multiplayer” mode where a second Wii-mote can activate additional scares as the other player attempts to complete the game.
When it works, the title immerses players in a dark and dingy world of generational curses and ghostly apparitions, with hand-crafted jump-scares testing your resolve as the game attempts to emulate the experience of actually living through the twists and turns of a classic Ju-On flick – complete with sickly black hair sprouting in unlikely places and disembodied heads watching you from inside of cupboards.
The title also borrows the narrative puzzle elements from the movies, forcing players to juggle multiple timelines and intentionally obtuse clues in order to piece together exactly what’s happening to the Yamada family (though you’ll likely only fully understand the story once you find all of the game’s well-hidden collectables). While I admit that this overly convoluted storytelling approach isn’t for everyone and likely sparked some of the game’s scathing reviews, I appreciate how the title refuses to look down on gamers and provides us with a complex narrative that fits right in with its cinematic peers.
Unfortunately, the experience is held back by some severe technical issues due to the decision to measure player movement through the Wii’s extremely inaccurate accelerometer rather than its infrared functionality (probably because the developers wanted to measure micro-movements in order to calculate how “scared” you were while playing). This means that you’ll often succumb to unfair deaths despite moving the controller in the right direction, which is a pretty big flaw when you consider that this is the title’s main gameplay mechanic.
In 2024, these issues can easily be mitigated by emulating the game on a computer, which I’d argue is the best way to experience the title (though I won’t go into detail about this due to Nintendo’s infamously ravenous legal team). However, no amount of post-release tinkering can undo the damage that this broken mechanic did on the game’s reputation.
That being said, I think it’s pretty clear that Shimizu and company intended this to be a difficult ordeal, with the slow pace and frequent deaths meant to guide players into experiencing the title as more of a grisly interactive movie than a regular video game. It’s either that or Shimizu took his original premise about the “Grudge” being born from violent deaths a little too seriously and wanted to see if the curse also worked on gamers inhabiting a virtual realm.
Regardless, once you accept that the odd gameplay loop and janky controls are simply part of the horror experience, it becomes a lot easier to accept the title’s mechanical failings. After all, this wouldn’t be much a Ju-On adaptation if you could completely avoid the scares through skill alone, though I don’t think there’s an excuse for the lack of checkpoints (which is another point for emulation).
It’s difficult to recommend Ju-On: The Grudge as a product; the controls and story seem hell-bent on frustrating the player into giving up entirely and it’s unlikely that you’ll unlock the final – not to mention best – level without a guide to the collectables. However, video games are more than just toys to be measured by their entertainment factor, and if you consider the thought and care that went into crafting the game’s chilling atmosphere and its beautifully orchestrated frights, I think you’ll find that this is a fascinating experience worth revisiting as an unfairly forgotten part of the Ju-On series.
Now all we have to do is chat with Nintendo so we can play this one again without resorting to emulation.
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