Howling Village: Echoes (Mini Review) — Howling From The Pain
Release Date: October 20th, 2021
Developer: FLAME Hearts Co.
Platforms: PC (Reviewed), Nintendo Switch
Price: $6.99
Let’s just jump straight into it—Howling Village: Echoes isn’t a bad game by any means, but it’s far from great and severely flawed.
My biggest issue has less to do with the gameplay itself - which is your run-of-the-mill point-and-click - and more to do with the outright horrendous writing these characters have. The first few were tolerable, but once a character named Shinji comes in and says arguably some of the dumbest, most cringe nonsense I’ve heard in a long time that sounded like a 6th grader trying to show his equally neurologically-challenged friends “this cool story I wrote”, it goes downhill from there. In fact, it’s so downhill one could argue it just collapses.
You’ll spend so much time at this phone booth you’ll wonder if at any point you’ll have to pay rent.
Every character then on is just insufferable, which is a shame because, despite the repetition, the gameplay itself is engaging enough to want to keep going if you’re into the stories and folklore surrounding Inunaki Tunnel and Inunaki Village (though it’s worth mentioning Howling Village: Echoes does the bare minimum in the point-and-click, hidden object, and puzzle scenarios).
Weapons do absolutely nothing in this game. In fact, since they’re ghosts, physical objects are pointless.
You’ll find the bulk of it to feel very low effort, and I feel if this game had come out potentially 10-15 years ago it may have been better received, but there’s no reason for the game to look, act, and play like an Artifex Mundi or Big Fish Games title from 2008, or games like Dracula's Legacy, etc. (with all due respect to them).
Some may even blame the visuals using altered real world images, but I think that’s a disservice to the approach of simply taking advantage of “real world moments and backgrounds” that can help make a game feel more rooted in actuality or feel plausible. Games like 428: Shibuya Scramble (a masterpiece in my opinion) prove there’s nothing wrong with this approach, and countless visual novels and lighter horror titles that try to take a snapshot of life and intertwine it into another story and something inherently digital by design. Where Howling Village: Echoes suffers in this regard is the PowerPoint presentation and animations therein that do everything in their power to convince you that what’s happening is scary, which instead ends up having the opposite effect.
Not Fatal Frame. Just fatal.
The audio here isn’t exactly doing it any favors either, with massive repetition in its ambiance alongside standard FX cues that feel like free presets in any given audio sampler. Ambiance, for example, has what feels like thirty second loops that are obvious and do not blend or fade seamlessly into a loop, and outside of those stock sound FX, there is just an egregious amount of crackling that happens to the audio as if bitrate compression and distortion is happening over poor internet that’s constantly dropping packets despite playing the game locally.
What I also found troublesome but to a degree clever was that the same scenes and environments basically play themselves over and over but with different people to ostensibly keep budget low but prolong game length. Despite multiple chapters all containing a different perspective and character, every single one more or less has the same scenario play out. Check phone booth -> go through tunnel -> complain about how dirty it is -> go through forest -> run from something in the village -> either die or live and end your chapter. The game will let you know how far you are with your progress with each chapter start, but by the time I was 20% through I already felt like I’d seen everything, making the rest feel unbelievably redundant.
The ‘Normal End’ in each scenario feels the same.
If you’re interested in the history of Inunaki Tunnel/Village and want to know more about it, I’d highly recommend games like Chilla's Art’s Inunaki Tunnel or the recently released Taro Is Back instead (Taro Is Back is not exactly the same setting but the same general atmosphere and approach). Again, however, I don’t want to discredit Howling Village: Echoes entirely either, because it’s interesting enough to give it a go if you’re into the genre, have interest in the lore, have seen Takashi Shimizu-sensei’s film Howling Village (optional), and get it on sale - but only if all of these line up for you. At face value as a passerby at full price, you’re better off looking elsewhere as you could likely throw a rock and hit something that would be a better use of your time.
PROS:
Inunaki Tunnel, Forest, and Village are all eerily fascinating, so those interested in the topic have more to invest in
CONS:
The writing is extremely poor, making the characters extremely unlikeable
The same scenes are used throughout the entire game, giving very little variety.
Persistent audio crackling can become irksome
