Twelve people are trapped in a skiing lodge in the middle of a snowstorm. When they find a chopped-up corpse in one of the rooms, our hero Tooru Yajima is certain–one of their number is a killer. But who? Depending on the player’s choices, Tooru might save his girlfriend Mari and the other guests from certain death. Or he might doom them all. That’s Kamaitachi no Yoru (known as Banshee's Last Cry in English), Chunsoft’s 1994 mystery sound novel for the SNES.
Kamaitachi no Yoru’s impact on Japanese visual novels and adventure games is everywhere if you know where to look. While it was hardly the first mystery story in a video game, it was one of the first to prioritize the story and atmosphere over the “game” aspect. Writers Kotaro Uchikoshi and Ryukishi07 both count it among their influences. (The sound of wind in Umineko: Where They Cry, to me, sounds just like the equivalent sound effect in Kamaitachi no Yoru.) These days, mystery remains as popular a theme in visual novels as romance and horror.
Yet Kamaitachi no Yoru is also fascinating in just how it differs from later visual novels. For one thing, the game depicts the characters as blue silhouettes. It’s a striking aesthetic choice that only appears in a handful of other games, like the indie title Shigatsu Youka. The silhouettes also make for striking animated sequences. There’s a brilliant scene early on when a cat leaps from behind a door, and we see it bound down the hall. Today that would be a CG. Back then, though, Chunsoft wanted to push their new medium as far as it could go.
Later mystery visual novels let the player “solve” the mystery just by playing through the game, as if they were reading a book. Not Kamaitachi no Yoru. When it comes time to name the killer, the game demands that you input the name of the culprit using the same kind of interface you’d use to name the hero in a Dragon Quest game. Misspell their name by mistake, or forget it, and you’ve lost your chance. You’ll almost certainly pick up on the killer’s identity after reaching a few endings, but the game wants you to be reading actively.
There’s another big difference between Kamaitachi no Yoru and its progeny, though, and it is a philosophical one. Many visual novels today progress from outside to inside. The player plays through routes, selecting options and crossing out possibilities, until they reach the true ending that resolves the knot at the heart of the story. As critic Helen Chazan once wrote in her review of the manga Summertime Rendering, “the goal in these games for their fans is not so much to get the good ending…but to get every ending, and thus learn everything about the characters and their world that is available to know.”
Kamaitachi no Yoru instead moves from inside to outside. The mystery plot takes just a few hours to solve. Once you reach a “good ending,” the game spirals out into alternate scenarios. One reimagines the cast as spies fighting for control over a missing assassin. Another introduces a supernatural threat, transforming what was previously a mystery story into a ghost story. There’s a meta scenario where the characters play their own game on the Super Famicom, a treasure hunt scenario that demands the player solve a riddle, and even a RPG scenario that parodies Chunsoft’s previous Torneko’s Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon.
It’s not that the mix of genres is unusual. Feinting with one genre only to abruptly shift into another is the oldest visual novel trick in the book. What’s weird is that none of the alternate scenarios are consistent. They play on your understanding of the characters, and sometimes thwart your expectations, but they do not build to any kind of greater truth. The closest the game’s meta-narrative has to a “big reveal” is a sequence hidden in the treasure scenario where the game’s author rants about Chunsoft’s true goal: world domination. It’s a memorable scene, but almost certainly a joke. (After all, if Chunsoft succeeded, Machi and 428 would be a lot more popular.)
I suspect the reason for this is that Chunsoft intended Kamaitachi no Yoru’s mystery scenario to be the heart of the game. Everything else, from the spooky Snow Maze scenario to the problematic sex farce that is the Comedy of O, was a bonus for hardcore fans. After all, who else would put in the work to find every ending? Unlike later visual novels, Kamaitachi no Yoru lacks a skip feature, and returning to previous chapters from the chapter select undoes the player’s earlier choices. You’re expected to endure some tedium if you want to see everything, which the game throws back in your face in the RPG parody scenario.
There’s a part of me that’s disappointed by this, that wishes the scenarios in Kamaitachi no Yoru fit together somehow. Still, I respect Chunsoft for designing the game this way. The studio designed its sound novels to reach audiences outside traditional video game fandom. Its successors though would become more and more niche. I have a soft spot for the indulgent complexity of 2000s era visual novels, but they were not for everybody, nor were they intended to be.
What’s funny to me, though, is that Kamaitachi no Yoru’s bonus scenarios in retrospect laid just as many seeds for future exploration as its central mystery plot. For instance, you can draw a line directly from the game’s treasure scenario to the Witch’s Epitaph in Umineko: Where They Cry. The hidden “Chunsoft Party Conspiracy” message from the game’s author reads like an early attempt at creepypasta, like if Majora’s Mask let you access Ben Drowned right from the cart. Another sequence in the RPG parody scenario, where the dungeon threatens to erase your save if you select the wrong one of two choices, is like something Yoko Taro could have made. (I wish Chunsoft followed through with it!)
I’m also reminded of Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi’s maximalist tribute to visual novels and adventure games. That game's breadth of scenarios felt to me less like a coherent universe than a fanfiction server dedicated to commemorating itself. After having played Kamitachi no Yoru, though, I’ve realized that Hundred Line followed directly from what Chunsoft achieved back in 1994: a memorable core route followed by zany bonus scenarios that throw the cast into different genres to see what happens.
Kamaitachi no Yoru of course is much smaller than Hundred Line. Its cast is thinly developed, its world the size of a humble ski lodge. Yet the game still feels unexpectedly expansive, to me, because of the developer’s intentions. A modern visual novel wants you to do and see everything. Kamaitachi no Yoru has no such expectations. When you stumble on something like the Chunsoft Party Conspiracy, it feels like a curse hidden by the developers in the game’s workings. Something you are not supposed to see. A strangely satisfying yet dangerous feeling. You ask yourself, “just how many endings are there?” You may never know the answer.
