Fear and anxiety prevail after the darkest tales from Japanese folklore come to life in this first-person psychological horror game. Set in a feudal era, Ikai revolves around the priestess of a shrine struggling to defeat the spirits of her past and her present.
It’s not very often I get sent physical copies of stuff, so you can imagine my joy when I was offered a physical copy of Ikai to review. Having not known anything about it, knowing nothing of its form or function, I was happy to give it a bash. Unfortunately, this is where most of my joy ended.
Ikai is a first-person horror adventure that provides an interesting starting point to understand a little more about the figures we continually encounter in ancient Japanese culture.
Ikai fails to utilize its Feudal Japan setting properly and despite the potential, in the end it's just forgettable.
Ikai is a horror game with a solid atmosphere and that's its main strength. Unfortunately, its tendency to jumpscare and poorly implemented puzzles cause the game to lose its momentum. Because of this, much of the gameplay feels more like an inconvenience than essential to the experience. Even so, fans of the genre will probably enjoy it a lot.
Ikai was a horror title I was actually really looking forward to. A game steeped in Japanese folklore in a self contained location could (and to be fair, should) have made for an absolutely terrifying and unique experience. However, it just didn’t manage to make the cut: its short runtime, generic gameplay loop and complete lack of scares resulted in...
