June 3, 2009 - I don't do well with horror. Scary movies, slasher flicks -- not my cup of tea. I get a little bit too freaked out, I run to the nearest lightswitch, I flip all the available illumination back on at its brightest setting and I curl up, comfortably, in a knee-clasping fetal position that calms me right back down.
JU-ON is not for me.
But it very well may be for you, and the millions of others in America who can't get enough of the scary stuff -- the same millions who made The Grudge a success in theaters a few years back, and that's the same series that this game is based on. Billed by publisher XSEED as a "haunted house simulator," JU-ON: The Grudge adapts the concepts and ideas of the film franchise and transforms it into an interactive, scare-the-crap-out-of-you atmospheric experience on Wii.
It looks pretty good. I got a look at the game in action at XSEED's meeting room here on the show floor at this year's E3, and it certainly has the right look -- grungy, dark and dreary. Your character slowly explores shadowy, haunted environments as the Wii Remote functions as your flashlight. You can move along at as fast or as slow of a pace as you want -- but, if you dawdle in one place too long, the ghosts will come out to play.
Tables spontaneously shook, footprints appeared in the dust out of nowhere, and partially-visible specters took flight away from the heroine as I looked on, already glancing around the room myself for the nearest available exit. The heroine continued her exploration, cautiously, and encountered a demon-possessed child hiding behind a nearby door -- who then disappeared.
This game is &^%$'d up, no doubt about it. And it gets even worse, apparently, when a second player joins the fun -- JU-ON isn't cooperative, but a second human with a Wii Remote can trigger spectral events for Player 1, to try to freak them out even more. Sounds like a sick joke waiting to happen -- sneak into the room when your buddy thinks he's playing alone, slickly grab the second Wiimote, skulk away into the shadows and use it to summon all kinds of horrors to assault his poor character. That's twisted.
JU-ON's definitely a different kind of game, as it's not survival horror, and it's not action-oriented -- there's no combat, no running from hordes of zombies or anything like that. It really is, though, a haunted house simulator -- an interactive, slow-paced exploration of a psychologically straining set of environments that will, guaranteed, cause you to have nightmares for weeks. If that's your deal, keep an eye out for this one when it launches in time for Halloween, this October. But, as for me, I'll be out at Walmart buying myself a new Sesame Street nightlight.
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This and Silent Hill are gonna make my nights a little scary me thinks.
