One might call me very anti-Fandom. Fandom-critical. Not the concept of liking things, obviousy, and not derivative works in general. Just the entire universe of heavily consumerist attitudes surrounding those things, actively discouraging an adult way of looking at art or enjoying it on a deeper level in favor of pretending that your favorite cartoon is a real thing that really happened. It's probably fine for kids but when I see adults doing it that's just embarassing, and nowadays the big corporations like Disney know about it and lean into it in an effort to reduce all creative work into a tepid puddle of boring crap where we are expected to clap for each and every first gay character for the rest of time.

Anyway with all that said the best way to get me to ignore it is to be absolutely off your rocker and be a single person almost entirely creating the most intricate RPG Maker game I've ever seen. I feel like only RPG Maker people create this exact type of madness, lying cleanly between a normal game and like, Dwarf Fortress.

Starting with part 3, Jojo's lends itself to fandom extremely well by being about cool guys with unique special powers named after references. This is just begging people to make up their own. 7SU, being a self-indulgent self-insert fanfic game, naturally leans into this. Besides numerous original villains, 7SU has eighteen potential player stands assigned to the eneagram personality types. For the record, I was assigned Napalm Death, a calligraphy pen that writes bombs. It has practically zero special events and is only good for fighting, leading a lot of me standing around watching the manga happen and sometimes jumping in to beat up a guy. The game is almost certainly much better if you have one of the support stands such as Cardigans, a nurse that heals people, or Pixies, which can control small life forms. They let you short circuit the tension of several fights in pretty hilarious ways to make them easier.

This is NOT to say that going off-script is easy. It usually requires you to win a tough optional fight. In fact, most of the story beat fights can be bypassed by either using the special "Plan" command or running away to make things follow the original story. You won't get XP or rewards for it, but you can probably do most of the game without actually bothering to play it. There are, however, like nine trillion endings to this sucker and most of them are gated behind making the crusaders like you, which is primary accomplished by fighting the new optional villains or just interfering in the plot. This ties into the overarching plot dealing with why you, some rando, are the seventh stand user, and why so many characters who shouldn't be born yet are making cameos. It's actually... kind of elegant?

What I really love about this kind of project, though, is that absolutely nobody who makes something this ambitious in RPG Maker has any sense of the word 'enough' so you can keep cycling through NG+ runs to unlock more and more absurd content, side stories, alternate routes, secret bosses, and all sorts of other crap. You can play the whole game through as Josuke with his own story because why not fuck it. Just keep adding to this thing. I love it. No official source would ever make this game. The brand cannot achieve this level of strength when it considers things like "profit" and "a large audience" only terrifyingly dedicated fans can make this thing.

Anyway it's freeware and has a good translation so I highly reccomend checking it out for a bit or even just marvelling at the wiki walkthrough if you're familiar enough with the original story to make sense of it. In fact you probably want the wiki even if you play normally to catch even half of the more absurd secrets you can get on one playthrough. There's a whole secret room that's just the last part of the original SaGa and you can talk to all the dead characters there. And CARS is there and you can FIGHT HIM and steal his chainsaw arm and use it to instantly kill GOD because it's a SaGa reference

Full video review: https://youtu.be/VaLxvyMRXBc

Somehow five years have already passed since the last Yomawari release and besides the time passing too quickly, I enjoyed that game a good bit. Super atmospheric, a large world to explore, and some decent puzzles too. This one though? Ehhhh....

Atmosphere
The atmosphere is easily the game’s best point. It is quite literally the same as it was five years ago: limited lighting, grainy world design, absolutely creepy yokai roaming about, and ambient sound design in place of a traditional soundtrack. For the type of story being told here, all of this works in the game’s favor.

That said, I was a bit disappointed that there’s really nothing “new” to differentiate the feel from the last release. It uses the same audio and graphical assets, has a very similar world design, and somehow feels a bit more empty.

Game World
One of the things I praised in the last release was that large world with plenty of stuff to find. This game has some of that, but it doesn’t quite match the extent of the former and honestly, it became boring to have to trek across identical, empty areas just to get to the next story objective.

Gameplay
I won’t make the case that Midnight Shadows was super involved gameplay-wise, but I can’t help but feel that Lost in the Dark took it even further down. Most of the gameplay involves running around, picking up items to get you to the next area, and then repeating. In fact, the first two “dungeons” or whatever were literally me searching however many rooms for a key or other item, picking it up and bringing it to unlock or activate something, and then repeating that in the newly unlocked area.

It’s back and forth busywork and maybe I’ve become less tolerant of such gameplay over the years, but the last one had a bit of this too, it just didn’t feel like to this extent. When you do get to a cool part - the boss encounters - those last maybe a few minutes before you have to cycle through the next hour or so of searching and pressing your one button to interact with things.

Performance
I ran the game at 4k 60 fps with no issues to speak of, although the settings are limited to just simple window and resolution options. Controls are simple enough that you can get away with doing keyboard and mouse, but it plays way better on controller and that is what I opted to use for my playthrough.

Overall
I cannot in good faith recommend Yomawari: Lost in the Dark. The last game - Midnight Shadows - may have been fun enough, but this is somehow worse while adding nothing really new. Great atmosphere, but with the same assets. A large open world to explore, but nothing really rewarding to find. A decently interesting story, but matched with some seriously tedious gameplay that left me bored after just a couple hours. Maybe in a bundle or on deep sale - but for now it’s not worth it.

It's been quite a while since I've played the previous two entries to this series, so maybe I'm forgetting some details but I certainly don't remember those games feeling like they enjoyed wasting my time. Walk to one point, get an item, then take the item back to its original location or walk around in a linear environment looking for key items with no sense of danger inbetween. A lot of this game felt empty both in the overworld and in "dungeons". I remember the previous games doing this, but certainly not to this degree. All these mind numbing tasks culminated into me dropping the game right at the end when I had to revisit certain parts of the game, but now with a new mechanic and a lot of unskippable dialog. Also, it's hard to feel any type of fear when the game reuses a lot of the same enemies from the previous game with very few new enemies. Maybe I'm just sick of these games formulas, but this game felt like an utter disappointment. It still has great atmosphere and beautiful art, but I'd recommend checking out Yomawari: Night Alone over this. It goes on sale frequently for under $5.

Unless you are into SUPER analyzing stuff to find hidden meanings and the truth, avoid this game, the base story is really unfocused and convoluted with some terrible dialogue, development, and annoying moments, the gameplay is janky and not fun, with some really poorly implemented mechanics, the battles drag like if it is in molasses and the whole thing can be REALLY BORING at times, there are some moments I enjoyed and the visuals, along with the music, are quite nice, but other than that, it's a pretty terrible experience.

Side Note: You probably already heard about the controversies surrounding this game, and the creator, and as someone who hated this game, I'm here to tell you that most of them were either fake or exaggerated by Twitter and hack game journalists, the creator itself didn't even mocked gamers or anything, the audio was taken out of context by a bad faith actor on the Blue Bird Hate Platform, this game is not good but let's stop spreading misinformation about an innocent Indie Dev.

https://medium.com/@wilsonmtaylor1991/games-journalism-has-flat-out-lied-to-you-about-yiik-and-andrew-allanson-for-hateclicks-11539ed6d101

Pretty good article explaining everything.