oof. i might be missing something here but this did not grab me at alllll as a horror manga fan/occasional roguelike enjoyer. while this does a fair job of emulating the surface level aesthetics of - and this may surprise you - junji ito, it lacks a lot of the character depth and involvement that make his stories so engaging, by putting all the scaries through the filter of a silent stoic protagonist with no concrete place or involvement in the world of the story. sure, ito writes a lot of scared teenagers going through fucked up situations, but nothing in my first hour or two left me feeling like my teenager was getting particularly fucked up by these events.

the roguelike random-event based structure means that even while trying to solve a specific mystery, you'll just have random seemingly-unrelated baddies popping up around every corner. if your inspiration is largely focused around unstoppable horror monsters and you morph them into generic jrpg mobs, it really really neuters the impact.

beyond that, runs feel heavily heavily rng dependent with very little involvement in the story or variability in the combat. a lot of people dispute calling this a roguelike, but i have no idea what else you'd call it, and as an example of that genre, it feels very thin.

i might give it another shot or two but i was legitimately bummed that this game boils down to that, since it's seemed so aesthetically interesting for years.