Japanese Schoolgirls and Urban Legends – Twilight Syndrome: Search [Review]

But when I started collecting materials, I learned that Suda 51 joined the work on the game already in the middle of development and did not have a decisive creative influence on it.
However, I can’t pass up this game for a number of reasons:
Firstly, this is still part of the gamography that interests me.
Secondly, despite the fact that Suda did not have a decisive influence on the game, his game design style can still be seen quite clearly in it.
And thirdly, the game is interesting in itself and, in my opinion, is worth the attention it is deprived of.

And so, today we’ll look at the game Twilight Syndrome: Seach

The game tells about the adventures of three schoolgirls. Japanese, of course 🙂

Schoolgirls, in their free time (and sometimes instead of studying), investigate rumors and urban legends. The girls’ names are Yukari, Chisato and Mika.

Gameplay Twilight Syndome: Search is a strange mixture of adventure game, walking simulator and graphic novel.

The developers put in the hands of the player a limited toolkit, consisting of the ability to control the movement of girls, interact with active objects in locations (doors, lockers and the like) and choose options for answers and dialogues.

The word search in the subtitle of the game turned out to be no coincidence – most of the time the player will have to look for active areas for interaction in locations.

In presenting the plot, the main emphasis is on dialogues and monologues of the characters, so there is quite a lot of text in the game. So much so that the game evokes strong associations with graphic novels or date-sims.

And reading all this text while playing the original copy of the game can be very problematic, since the game was never officially published outside of Japan and was not translated from Japanese into other languages.

This was partly facilitated by Suda himself 51. The game designer believed that the game was not close to Western players and they would not be able to understand it.
When the issue of localizing the game was being decided, he was against it.

It’s unfortunate that this happened with localization, but there’s nothing to do, we need to somehow figure out the plot.

And before we begin, I must warn. Don’t think so, I understand perfectly well that it’s unlikely that anyone who plays or is going to play Twilight Syndrome is watching this video right now. And that the likelihood of such an event is extremely low. But I still have to warn you: There will be spoilers for longer. Large. About this size:

Now we can continue.
Structurally, the game consists of a prologue and five investigation chapters. Each chapter can be completed with a bad and a good ending.

If you complete a chapter with a bad ending, you will need to replay it. After all, until the good ending is revealed, the next chapter does not open either.

It all starts with a prologue level called “The Rumor That Started It All”
The girls snuck into the school at night to check out a rumor that one of the stalls in the toilet on the third floor was boarded up, not because it was in disrepair, but because a junior high school student had once been locked in it. She couldn’t get out and died there, but her spirit is still nearby and can be summoned. This is what I understand, the premise for a horror movie.

On the way to the toilet, the girls communicate with each other and thus tell who is who and what they are responsible for in this team.

Yukari — a girl with a flashlight is the main character of the game, almost all the time we control her. In addition to carrying a flashlight, he is the voice of reason in the group, settles disputes and deals with organizational issues. By the way, it was she who got the keys to the school for a night outing.

Mika – the red-haired girl who walks behind. She is the initiator of all investigations, collects rumors and legends, which her friends then check. He has a hot temper and periodically runs into either Yukari or Chisato. Her relationship with the latter doesn’t work out very well at all. In the very first dialogue, she asks Yukari, maybe, why did you knock her down in the first place?. And she’s not at all embarrassed that Chisato stands half a meter away from her and hears everything.

A Chisato – this is the girl who walks in the middle. She is Yukari’s friend and serves as the team’s medium. A person who feels otherworldly. (Just like that guy from the movie “The Sixth Sense”) And she reported this somehow casually, as if it was nothing special:

Chisato: Friends, I can feel otherworldly forces and see the souls of the dead.
Girlfriends: Oh, ok, lol

While talking, the girls get to the same booth.

Having knocked on the booth and unexpectedly not receiving an answer from it, Mika first explains how to summon the spirit. You need to spin three times and then knock on the door three times. But it doesn’t work.

Then, unexpectedly, Chisato gives an alternative option for how to summon the soul of a junior high school student. You need to do almost the same thing, only instead of counting to three you need to say a counting rhyme.

The second attempt also does not bring visible results and the girls decide that the myth is destroyed and they can go home.

Everything goes well until Yukari is suddenly overtaken by the same girl from the booth.

Afterwards there is a section with running around the school in the dark, trying to escape from the ghost.
You also need to choose where to run using answer options in dialogues.

The chase ends with the girls ending up at a dead end on the school roof.
And from the door leading to the stairs a ghost girl comes out to meet them.

The situation is not pleasant, but the girl says that there is no need to be afraid, because the worst things are yet to come.

This is where the prologue ends. Who this girl is, what really happened to her, we won’t find out anymore in the game, and Mika, Ukari and Chisato won’t talk about it anymore.
What follows are five investigative chapters, each examining a rumor or urban legend. I will dwell on the plot of each of them.

Rumor 1 “A park where you can take a lot of ghost photos”

A friend shows Mika a photo that bothers her.
Photo taken in a local park. There is a mysterious artifact on it. A line that runs along people’s necks and seems to cut off their heads.

Mika tells Yukari and Chisato about this. She considers the photo proof that there are ghosts in the park and they can be photographed.

The girls go to the park, to the bridge, a mysterious photo was taken to explore it.

In the park, girls periodically notice the presence of otherworldly forces, and Chisato feels that this place is filled with fear and hatred.
This feeling intensifies as you approach the park. Something is wrong with this parking lot.

Deep in the park, Mika Chisato and Yukari find an old map that shows that the parking area used to be a small temple.
The friends are separated, and Chisato meets a blind old man with a guide dog, whom he initially mistakes for a ghost.

The old man says that he https://napolicasino.co.uk/bonus/ can be called Mr. Sakai and scolds Chisato for walking alone in the park at night.

Sakai also says that you should especially not go to the top of the hill to the ancient gate at night.

Chisato promises not to do this and of course the friends go straight there.

At the top of the mountain they have a vision of this place in the distant past.

Hastily going downstairs, the girl doesn’t even have time to discuss what the hell they just saw something when a truck that had flown off the road falls on them.

Dodging a truck, Chisato rolls head over heels down the mountain and falls into the lake. The last thing she sees before losing consciousness is dozens of dead heads flying towards her.

And the first thing he sees when he wakes up is Mr. Sakai and his dog, who arrived in time and saved the girl from death at the bottom of the lake.

Sakai says that Chisato’s friends are fine and the ambulance is on the way. He also explains exactly why you shouldn’t walk in these places.

Once upon a time, the top of the mountain was the place where criminals were executed. The heads were chopped off at the top and they rolled down the hill and fell straight into the lake.

Later, the government filled in the bottom of the lake to improve it. The heads of the criminals remained lying below, not allowing the souls of their owners to calm down at all.

The ancient temple partly helped souls find peace, but when it was demolished to build a parking lot, the situation worsened greatly.

The place, filled with fear and hatred, began to exert its detrimental influence: people began to disappear in the park and accidents often occurred.

After Chisato recovered from her fall from the mountain, she found Mr. Sakai’s address and decided to come and thank him for saving him, but when she arrived, she found out that Sakai had recently passed away, and his dog could not bear the grief and ran away.

The chapter ends with the fact that a small temple was built in the ill-fated parking lot to replace the demolished one, and the situation in the park gradually improved.

Rumor 2 “M”.F. From the music class"

The second rumor begins with the suicide of a schoolgirl named Mayumi Fujita.

Over the speakerphone, music teacher Mr. Okuna is asked to urgently go to the music class, and when he enters, he sees Mayumi hanging there.

There is a rumor going around the school that Mayumi dated this teacher and decided to commit suicide just because of him.

To investigate this rumor, Mika Chisato and Yukari of course go to school at night right to the scene of Mayumi’s death.
Having reached the music class, the girls find nothing supernatural and decide to summon the ghost of Mayumi Fujita over the speakerphone. Because Mika believes that Mayumi and Mr. Okuna used the speakerphone to arrange meetings.

The friends go to the communication room and turn to Mayumi from it, inviting her to urgently come to the music class.
This scene got me. The voice on the speakerphone in the interiors of an empty, dark school gives me goosebumps.

Upon returning to the music class, the friends meet the ghost of Mayumi, who immediately possesses Miku.

After talking with Mayumi, Yukari and Chisato persuade her to let Miku go and learn that she is still waiting for a meeting with Mr. Okuna, and at the same time the details of their relationship. Okuna got tired of Mayumi and decided to leave her, and she committed suicide out of resentment.

Yukari calls Okuna and, resorting to blackmail (threatening that he will tell everyone that the teacher was dating his student), persuades him to come and apologize to Mayumi. Okuna doesn’t believe it, but still comes. And after talking with him, Mayumi’s soul finds peace and leaves the music room.

Rumor 3 “The Last Train”

It all starts with Yukari, having quarreled with her mother, meets with her friends.
Mika, in order to support Yukari, suggests going to the railway station, which has a bad reputation, and looking for all sorts of supernatural things there, in order to unwind, so to speak.Girls know how to have fun.

At the station, my friends have several encounters with ghosts, the details of whose deaths are helped by Chisato’s gift.
This is a boy who wanted to buy juice from the machine, but dropped the money on the way, went down to get it and got hit by a train.

A woman who committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train, but just before her death realized that this was an unforgivable act, and now found herself tied to the station.

And a rather creepy telephone conversation with a man who was cut in half by a train, but he still promises to come to the meeting and asks to wait for him right at the payphone he is calling.

At the climax of the episode, the friends see a mysterious train, which stopped briefly at an empty closed station.

The player will have to make a choice for Mika – to get on this train or not.

If you get on the train, the episode ends with a bad ending: Mika doesn’t show up at home, and a few days later she is found by the police two stations away from where she boarded the late train. Mika doesn’t remember anything and doesn’t speak. The chapter ends with Mika never coming to her senses.

If you don’t get on the train, the friends return home safely, and later see in their photographs from the station that this place is filled with ghosts. A strange train. Which Mika almost sat on is not intended for people at all.

I found this chapter to be the least interesting in the game, but there are some interesting thoughts on the nature of urban legends and haunted places.

While walking around the station, Mika calls her friend Aramata, a fellow researcher of urban legends. Aramata tells Mika his thoughts on why ghosts may appear at stations in schools and other public places.

What brings them to life is the fear of people. A form of fear that has intensified with the development of cities – a strong subconscious fear of strangers. Being in a crowd, a person is afraid of strangers, and if something terrible happens to him and he dies, then his emotions and fear endow the public place with energy, which calls ghosts to life.

Rumor 4 “The Seven Secrets of the Hinashiro School”

“The Seven Mysteries of Hinashiro School” is my favorite chapter in the game.

Mika once again brought her friends to school at night and in an ominous voice tells them the details of the mysteries that they will unravel.I think it’s in an ominous voice, there’s no voice acting. Text only

Mystery 1 – Thirteen steps in a flight of stairs. Typically, a school has 11 steps on each flight. But there is one flight in which at night there are 13 steps, and if you climb them, counting them out loud, but at the top you will be greeted by the ghost of a dead school student.

Mystery 2 – Cursed bust – in the fine arts room, in one of the busts, the skull of the teacher’s wife is walled up, who killed her out of jealousy and thus got rid of the evidence.

Mystery 3 – Ghostly Voices in the Library. At night in the library you can hear loud voices of ghosts, which sometimes do not stop talking for several hours.

Mystery 5 – Skeleton in biology class. The skeleton model in biology class is actually a real skeleton, containing the soul of a person obsessed with regaining his body. At night, the skeleton moves and can attack someone who happens to be nearby.

Mystery 6 – Inventory locker that won’t open. In the backyard of the school there is a locker in which the corpse of a cat is walled up. And every night, the cat comes to the locker and mourns his beloved for a long time.

Mystery 7 – The Ghost of the Athletics Club Student. There’s a ghostly runner that appears every night at the stadium and just runs around.

And secret 4? – You ask. And secret number four is that the Mathematician and the Fizruk are rumored to be homosexuals and are dating each other. What this mystery does in the list of other horror stories is unclear.

After listening to the briefing, the girls set off to do the job and bring these secrets to light. Here’s what they really are.
Mystery 1 – No matter how strange it may be, a staircase with 13 steps was mistakenly placed in one of the flights. And Mika didn’t bother to count the steps during the day.

Mystery 2 – The cursed bust turned out to be a large piggy bank, into which the teacher painstakingly collected coins. And the girls committed an act of vandalism during the investigation.

Mystery 3 – In search of ghostly voices, Mika Yukari and Chisato snuck into the library and heard voices there. Physical education and mathematics. Who very languidly discussed the fact that they shouldn’t meet like that at night, they say it’s unethical and they are teachers, and what if someone finds out and similar speeches.

And that’s when Mika decided that although myth number three was destroyed, myth number four, about relationships between teachers that go beyond work, was confirmed.

And how cool it will be to share this rumor with your gossip friends.

But then other male teachers join the nasty physical education teacher and math teacher in drinking and mahjong. And they begin to prepare for a night of drinking.

Yes, the guys really meet secretly in the library, but not for what Mika was thinking.

Mystery 5 – The skeleton in the biology class moves because there is a boiler room on the floor below. Vibration from the pumps causes the skeleton to move. And upon closer inspection, the skeleton turns out to be quite plastic. In short, the myth is destroyed.

Mystery 6 – Having broken into a cabinet next to which a cat is mourning his beloved, the girls find a bag of cat food there. And the cat, it turns out, comes here not out of great and pure love, but because of the smell of food.

Mystery 7 – the school’s stone mascot runs around the stadium every night – some guy with a bundle of firewood behind his back. It was not only me who found it difficult to comment on this, but also Mika, Yukari and Chisato.

The sight of the running stone man marks the end of this chapter.

I liked it because it conveys an interesting idea that people are capable of inventing the craziest legends and rumors and endowing the most ordinary things with supernatural properties. Except for the running stone man of course. 🙂

“Another rumor”

Mika starts chatting on his desk with a stranger as a joke.
At first everything goes well. The interlocutor says that he recently read a cool book called “The Wind Has Risen” and recommends that Mika definitely read it.

But soon the Girl realizes that something is wrong with the stranger, it’s as if he is not from this era. And then the interlocutor, like an emo kid, begins to talk about death and the fact that he will soon leave this world.
But before this happens, the mysterious interlocutor definitely wants to meet Mika.
Mika tells her friends about this. Says he will stop all communication with the stranger. Goes to the library to make a book “The Wind Has Risen” and disappears.
Chisato and Yukari go to look for it and in the library they find out that the book was given as a gift to the school by the parents of a girl who died thirty years ago after falling from a cliff.

Yukari and Chisato run as fast as they can towards this cliff and find Miku on it.
Mika is clearly not himself. She keeps talking about how she has to meet her friend. And jumps off a cliff.

But to the surprise of her friends and to her happiness, she doesn’t fall down, but flies up.

The game ends at this ambiguous moment. The fact is that Twilight Syndrome: Search and its sequel Twilight Syndrome: Investigation were supposed to be one game. But during development, it was decided to split the game into two parts and release them separately.

Players had to wait, but the guys from Human already had a stated release date for the next part and a teaser for the sequel, which they added to the game after the credits.

Before continuing with the subtitle investigation. We’ll get there sometime next time.

What I haven’t talked about here yet is sound and music. The sound design is very high quality and creates and maintains the atmosphere well. Voice acting is added where needed and makes you even flinch at some moments of the game, although there are no screamers in the game.

Despite the fact that the game is definitely aimed more at teenagers and its atmosphere is reminiscent of such shows as “Are You Afraid of the Dark” and “Goosebumps”, I was very interested in getting acquainted with it and looking through it at the life and customs of Japan in the 90s.

And that’s all I have. Hope you enjoyed the review.
Until next time, bye!

Best comments

This is not a review. I started reading and seemed interested. I think I’ll probably play. Then a sign: “beware of spoilers”. Ok, then I looked through the text, strictly assessing the structure, in order to understand where the spoilers would end, when I could start reading, and how big the spoilers were in general, it seems like I was never particularly afraid of them. And there’s just some strange, not very interesting, brief retelling of the events of the game. Some kind of halfway through. No, I definitely don’t want to read that. Walkthroughs for old games are sometimes needed so that the shutdown doesn’t drag on too long, but I wanted a review! Eh 🙁

And when the spoilers ended, the text also ended.

In general, I didn’t like the material, but I looked up materials about the game on the Internet, and it interested me. Minus for the content, plus for the find that I had never heard of before, I will refrain from rating the blog.