An overzealous slog to Yomi.
A game dripping in well intentioned Kurosawa influence, a masterclass in aesthetic. Those camera angles, that crackling static, grit and grain, together with a perfect recreation of the exact type of black & white you'd see in one of the aforementioned director's films. Unlike Ghost of Tsushima's surface level rendition of the style as flat gray-scale, no; this is true black & white with heavy contrast between the two leading to blinding skies and inky depths. In that regard, and that aspect alone Trek to Yomi is a 10/10. Now let's get real.
Aesthetical and atmospheric competence can not even begin to save a game this inexorable and exhausting to play, poor pacing and one-note combat is a disastrous pairing. Clocking in at around 4-5 hours, and feeling closer to 10, Trek to Yomi has seemingly no self awareness in how much it overindulges in it's own mediocrity. The combat fails to impress at every turn, I was expecting enemies to be able to surround you in a more dynamic 2.5D way, but here they just sorta awkwardly shift in place lined up behind one another for you to go through the motions of effortlessly parrying and countering them until the game grants mercy and lets you move to the next wave. At some point I felt like I was almost beginning to have some semblance of enjoyment towards it, in how simple and reliable every move was, but it soon loses whatever it had going for it when you eventually realise the optimal strategy for quite literally every battle is to turn your back on the enemy and hit them with that 3 hit back attack combo. Having virtually no wind up or failure rate, and soon shortening itself even further to a 2 hit combo which leaves the adversary stunned and open to an execution, subsequently healing you on top of that... All I can say is a lot of those later fights start looking real goofy.
And lets get into the titular Yomi part; the land of the dead in Shinto religion/mythology. It's unfortunate to say but I really could've done without this whole, bloated, clichéd and tropey section which makes up the whole second half of the game. Here we have less of that grounded, intimate focus and camera placement trading it off for boring, amateur quasi-surrealist motiffs that feel traveled before in not at all a complementary way comparative to first chunk. Here the camera is peeled way back, we fight annoying spirits and ghostly apparitions, losing that grounded setting the game did so well with earlier. We rarely get close up camera placement that acknowledges the inherently intimate nature of swords plunging into flesh; in Yomi we feel miles away from the main battle and resign to a position of observer more and more, especially when we reconsider how much more involved the combat could've been.
It really never knows when to quit and call it a day either, introducing some of the most asinine ""puzzles"" I've seen in a minute way into the back end which never move past 'say what you see' levels of depth. The bosses too, christ almighty they're all so wonky. Most of the time you can comfortably just rock back, expend all your ranged weapon ammo and go in for a few cheap swipes at the end; again nothing about this combat system impresses, and it wouldn't be such a mark against it if accepted that and made fights more meaningful and less arbitrary.
Narratively its not saying much either, has one banger line in the prologue "Choose fear while you still can.", in context it sets the stage and tone pretty well. Not that it really builds on it; Trek to Yomi would've done better being half the length if even that, which is saying something when its already so short. I could only really stomach around 30 minutes of this journey a session so it ended up commanding a commitment of around 5 days from me and that's particularly noteworthy because I'm pretty quick to finish games when I'm engaged.
A disappointment for sure, but the style really is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If you're into Kurosawa's stuff, maybe you've only seen Seven Samurai and loved it, there is at least something to be seen and gained here. Don't feel too bad if you end up tapping out somewhere along the way.
A game dripping in well intentioned Kurosawa influence, a masterclass in aesthetic. Those camera angles, that crackling static, grit and grain, together with a perfect recreation of the exact type of black & white you'd see in one of the aforementioned director's films. Unlike Ghost of Tsushima's surface level rendition of the style as flat gray-scale, no; this is true black & white with heavy contrast between the two leading to blinding skies and inky depths. In that regard, and that aspect alone Trek to Yomi is a 10/10. Now let's get real.
Aesthetical and atmospheric competence can not even begin to save a game this inexorable and exhausting to play, poor pacing and one-note combat is a disastrous pairing. Clocking in at around 4-5 hours, and feeling closer to 10, Trek to Yomi has seemingly no self awareness in how much it overindulges in it's own mediocrity. The combat fails to impress at every turn, I was expecting enemies to be able to surround you in a more dynamic 2.5D way, but here they just sorta awkwardly shift in place lined up behind one another for you to go through the motions of effortlessly parrying and countering them until the game grants mercy and lets you move to the next wave. At some point I felt like I was almost beginning to have some semblance of enjoyment towards it, in how simple and reliable every move was, but it soon loses whatever it had going for it when you eventually realise the optimal strategy for quite literally every battle is to turn your back on the enemy and hit them with that 3 hit back attack combo. Having virtually no wind up or failure rate, and soon shortening itself even further to a 2 hit combo which leaves the adversary stunned and open to an execution, subsequently healing you on top of that... All I can say is a lot of those later fights start looking real goofy.
And lets get into the titular Yomi part; the land of the dead in Shinto religion/mythology. It's unfortunate to say but I really could've done without this whole, bloated, clichéd and tropey section which makes up the whole second half of the game. Here we have less of that grounded, intimate focus and camera placement trading it off for boring, amateur quasi-surrealist motiffs that feel traveled before in not at all a complementary way comparative to first chunk. Here the camera is peeled way back, we fight annoying spirits and ghostly apparitions, losing that grounded setting the game did so well with earlier. We rarely get close up camera placement that acknowledges the inherently intimate nature of swords plunging into flesh; in Yomi we feel miles away from the main battle and resign to a position of observer more and more, especially when we reconsider how much more involved the combat could've been.
It really never knows when to quit and call it a day either, introducing some of the most asinine ""puzzles"" I've seen in a minute way into the back end which never move past 'say what you see' levels of depth. The bosses too, christ almighty they're all so wonky. Most of the time you can comfortably just rock back, expend all your ranged weapon ammo and go in for a few cheap swipes at the end; again nothing about this combat system impresses, and it wouldn't be such a mark against it if accepted that and made fights more meaningful and less arbitrary.
Narratively its not saying much either, has one banger line in the prologue "Choose fear while you still can.", in context it sets the stage and tone pretty well. Not that it really builds on it; Trek to Yomi would've done better being half the length if even that, which is saying something when its already so short. I could only really stomach around 30 minutes of this journey a session so it ended up commanding a commitment of around 5 days from me and that's particularly noteworthy because I'm pretty quick to finish games when I'm engaged.
A disappointment for sure, but the style really is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If you're into Kurosawa's stuff, maybe you've only seen Seven Samurai and loved it, there is at least something to be seen and gained here. Don't feel too bad if you end up tapping out somewhere along the way.