At least Earth has basements. Right?
You wake up tied to a chair. The door is locked. In the corner, a camera turns toward you, and two voices — Morrow and Venn — take notes on how you try to get out.
Above the door there are tally marks scratched into the wall. A lot of them. Some of them are yours.
Dig. For real.
- Volumetric digging: the earth has real geometry and collision. Carve your own tunnels, dig around obstacles and come back through the passages you made yourself.
- Climb with your hands: grab the ledges your digging leaves behind and ascend a shaft of five strata, each stranger than the last.
- The red thread (赤い糸): if you get lost, hold H and a red thread will lead you to your next objective. A hand-drawn map fills in with everywhere you have been.
Something hears you digging
The Digger is blind. It hears your cuts, your screams and your footsteps, and opens its own tunnels to reach you. It stays still while you look at it... until you look away.
Stone jizō line the galleries. When you look back, they are facing you. There is a konbini open underground, its fluorescent lights buzzing and a vending machine that gives you what you didn't ask for. At five in the afternoon, a loudspeaker tells all good children to go home.
The buried house
A service lift goes down to the house from your other life, rebuilt from memory and wrong. Tatami, paper fusuma, oshiire closets... and
The One Who Waits: a woman in a white kimono with impossibly long hair, humming your lullaby as she searches room by room.
- Find the fuses. Hide in the closets. Don't let her see you get in.
- Salt on the thresholds holds her back. An ofuda on a door forces her to burn it before she opens it.
- The house learns: always hide in the same closet and next time she will go straight to it.
- In the basement bathroom, the third stall. Knock three times.
Don't look back
- Something is climbing behind you. It has no legs. It drags itself up the rock on its elbows.
- Kisaragi Station. At the end of the climb you board a train that should not exist. The next stop is not on any map.
- Kagome kagome. Children sing in a circle. When the song ends, it asks who is standing right behind you. Don't turn around.
- The Warden wears a paper lantern where its head should be. If its light touches you, run.
The game remembers you
Every life leaves marks: your old tunnels already dug, your shovel where it caught you last time, and a note in your own handwriting that knows exactly what you did. A film camera whose flash is your only weapon; photos are developed in the darkroom, and some of them show someone standing behind you. Then someone is.
No death: if it catches you, you are dragged back to the start of the tunnels. Sudden scares can be turned off in Settings.
