Terrors

Terrors is one of the most distinctive attempts ever seen on the WonderSwan, because it tries to evoke fear on a small monochrome display without a single loud jump scare. The game is made up of short horror episodes that place the player in uncomfortable situations and let them progress through exploring the environment, finding objects, and solving small puzzles. The pace is slow and deliberately uncomfortable. Instead of action, it relies on silence, on suggestion, and on the feeling that something is wrong, an approach much closer to the Japanese horror tradition than to the Western spooky action games of the time.

The atmosphere is carried mainly by the visuals and sound. The black-and-white image with its coarse resolution paradoxically helps, because details are left unresolved, and the imagination fills them in far more unsettlingly than any artist ever could. The soundtrack is sparse, often more a matter of noise and isolated tones than melodies, and in a quiet environment it works surprisingly powerfully. The game also plays with when the player turns it on, so playing at night isn't the same as playing in broad daylight, an idea that sets it apart from the run of ordinary handheld production.

At the time, Terrors remained a marginal affair. It was an experiment on a console that was itself a minority choice, and outside Japan almost nobody knew about it. Precisely for that reason, collectors and connoisseurs remember it today as proof that the WonderSwan wasn't just a platform for licensed anime games and puzzle trifles, but also for ideas no major console would ever have funded. Anyone able to get past the language barrier and not expect action will find here an unusual, moody game whose charm lies in what it doesn't show. It plays best in the dark, with headphones, and without haste, exactly as horror deserves, and under such conditions even simple black-and-white graphics can send an unpleasant chill down the spine. It's precisely this economy that makes Terrors a title that ages far better than period attempts at realistic horror.