Ju-On The Grudge: A Fright Simulator (Wii) Review

As I write this review I cradle a cup of mint hot chocolate. Mainly because it's delicious, but also because I needed to calm my nerves a tad. I'm a big sissy and Ju-On knows how to push my buttons, with its grabbing arms bursting out of places they shouldn't and things that shift around spookily. Don't be mistaken though - Ju-On is not a traditional survival horror game as you might be led to expect. It's more akin to a ghost train or something similar, hence the subtitle: A Fright Simulator. You wander through the levels, looking at and interacting with the environments, but you do not attack anything; the closest thing to action is collecting batteries to power your torch. Oh, and the whole 'escape from the murderous ghosts' part is pretty big...

The best way of thinking of Ju-On is as a casual horror game, as opposed to most others that are games aimed purely at hardcore audiences. If you're expecting a game where you can go around shooting things in the face, look elsewhere, as you'll find no joy in Ju-On. No, this is horror for the non-gamer, which means a simplified experience that's split into five episodes, each ranging somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes in length on average. Your goal in these levels is to basically be led along by the 'signposts' that appear; things like hospital boards lighting up telling you which rooms need attention. It's not on-rails - all control is completely manual - but heavy hints tell you where you're supposed to be going next. The 'next' inevitably involves some kind of ghost attack.

Before you begin, you are asked to select your gender and starsign. It reveals why later. At the end of each episode you are given a ranking on scare factor and sissy factor; how much you have investigated your surroundings and how much your hand/the remote has been shaking or moving during scare moments. A paragraph pops up, too, explaining your reactions and how that correlates with how people of your starsign might react. It may have been nice to see this expanded more with graphs or statistics to show exactly what sort of moment scared each player most, but it is what it is.

A criticism that many may have is that the game moves too slowly. I don't share this negativity; it all adds to the experience. The Wii remote becomes your torch, and wherever you point is where a beam of light goes into the dark, murky rooms. Holding B makes you take steps in the direction that your light is spilling. Tiny, shuffling steps. I can understand why this might frustrate, but the atmosphere is what is important in a game such as this, and the snail's pace means that you know inherently that you cannot just run away from scares; you must endure them. You might see something cross the corridor and go to follow it, and your slow walk, the extra time it takes to get to your destination, allows the tension to creep up inside of you, the anticipation building to whatever horror you might find. For me, it worked.

A lot of the scares are relatively predictable - many involve the main ghosts, the deadly vengeful ghost girl who wants nothing more than to rip your face off and the bizarre boy-child that meows like a cat, popping out of things - but the entire game has an air to it that is unsettling. You know when things are going to happen, but it doesn't stop you jumping if you're playing it in the right frame of mind, playing for the thrills in an appropriate setting and not just sitting half-arsedly messing about on it in a daylit room. Then, there actually is the odd moment that makes you jump and call the game awful names. It plays on your mind; very early on you get a lesson in the bad things that happen when you open doors, and the feeling of uneasiness whenever you touch a door knob never dissipates after these moments.

It would be wrong to say that Ju-On does everything right, however. For everything it gets right in terms of atmosphere, there are big faults with the pointer controls - it really doesn't feel as smooth as it should do. Your torch can become very jerky, resulting in cumbersome looking and turning around, often after direct encounters with the female ghost, wherein you have to shake the remote to match on-screen arrows to avoid a nasty end. It seems that the shaking occasionally mucks up the aiming. It doesn't ruin the game, but it shouldn't be happening and does prevent it from being all it could have been. It can be rectified very quickly by pressing the Wii's home button and then clicking back into the game to 'reset' the pointer, though the associated frustration takes you out of the experience, sometimes undermining any atmosphere that has been built up. At first I believed the game just didn't like my sensor bar's placement, but when the issues were still present after moving it around several times it became apparent that this wasn't the case.

It's also quite harsh in the placement of batteries. You are essentially timed by a meter in the bottom left corner that determines how much juice is left in your torch, and so a constant worry is in collecting up enough energy to keep the light shining. Let it go out and it's game over. Once you manage to get a spare battery pack in hand you generally have enough until you find one or two more, but getting started can sometimes be a little tough when you're not initially sure where you're going; it can be all too easy to waste your first precious energy cylinder poking at random doors in the new place you've plonked in rather than hunting out batteries. In addition, for a casual game it isn't friendly enough to explain the controls in-game, which is a bit of a must for the audience.

Ju-On is not the sort of game that is best played alone; it's a social experience, something to crack out with your other half or if you have mates around so that you can all laugh at each others' reactions. Developers Feel Plus have included a quick play Courage Mode, letting you skip into any level that you have unlocked without affecting your save game. There's also a two player mode of sorts to capitalise on this, wherein one player can carry on normally while another can man a second remote and deliver scares at random intervals by pushing buttons. The images or objects that burst up are never as frightening as the properly scripted bits, and usually end up more funny than anything, but with decent timing it adds a little something. It would have been nice to see more variety for the things that pop up, though, as they loop very quickly. Wisely, button pressing on the second remote has been restricted so that it can only be done every 15 seconds so that nobody can be irritating by spamming ghosts and slowing down the player's progress even further.