Shizuku no Oto -fall into poison- (しずくのおと -fall into poison-) Review

So here’s how I found this game. I saw some foreigner streaming it on YouTube, in English of course.

I didn’t even watch the game itself, just the part where the OP played. Honestly the OP is pretty good, pretty damn sick. And from the OP you can pretty much tell it’s a horror game. More importantly, the Japanese lyrics in the OP told me this was probably a Japanese Galgame that got an English localization. I got curious and looked around for info on it, but there’s basically nothing out there—just some stream videos and not much else.

That got me hooked. I wanted to play it, searched everywhere and couldn’t find it, except on Steam.

So I bought it on the game’s Steam page. It’s not big, a little over 700 MB, supports English and Japanese, just no voice acting. The surprise is it supports Windows / Linux / Mac, so after downloading, the journey began.

I just want to say, this game’s journey really felt like a close call…

The game 《しずくのおと -fall into poison-》 got translated on Steam as 《Sound of drop -fall into poison-》, which is fair enough. Japan has this quirk: the ones willing to mess with players are mostly doujin games, while the real big companies (though they’re not that big) play it safe. So since this game shows up as a horror mystery made by a doujin studio, I was prepared to get played to death without mercy. I just didn’t notice the part in the description saying it has over 30 endings, and most of them are Bad Ends—so I kept dying and dying…

That酸爽 feeling, I can’t even describe it.

A lot of you who’ve seen Hong Kong ghost movies will recognize the story. Legend says the Tenkū Aquarium’s water turns red on the night of the full moon, there’s a fish with a human face, and there’s a secret area that only opens on full moon nights. So our adventurous heroine and her best friend go exploring.

By the way, the protagonist is female, so this probably isn’t a Galgame—more like a horror AVG.

The heroine has memories of this aquarium. After all, five years ago she brought her little sister Mari (I’m guessing the Japanese name is “真理”) here to play, and her sister disappeared here and never showed up again.

This time the heroine comes back with her friend, and she starts seeing hallucinations—a mysterious girl who looks a bit like her sister. She chases after her, and the story kicks off, because soon she follows the girl into an area she’s never seen, full of dead fish and more experimental-looking tanks breeding weird fish.

That’s when choices start popping up frequently—red choices mean danger, pick wrong and you die…

The heroine runs around this terrifying place, soon finds her friend dead, then the old guy she met at the entrance is dead too… Some say poison, some say madness.

As the game progresses, a mysterious woman appears with the mysterious girl from the start. The two start arguing, and the girl gets literally beaten to death by the woman—can’t get much worse. The heroine also faces all kinds of hallucinations and ghosts, plus humanoid monsters made of jellyfish, some looking like her sister Mari. You even get to choose whether to recognize her or not.

Eventually the heroine reaches the old aquarium director’s office. The water in the whole aquarium turns red, and after a bunch of chaos, the truth comes out.

Turns out the old director was framed and killed by that woman five years ago on that full moon night. The heroine happened to bring Mari here to play that day, and Mari, running around, witnessed the murder and got chased down and silenced. After that, the aquarium filled with vengeful spirits of the fish and people the woman killed, causing all the hauntings.

The girl from the beginning was actually the old director’s daughter, who came seeking the truth about her father’s death, and got silenced too.

Just like those Hong Kong/Taiwan horror films you’ve seen—someone dies unjustly, so it’s haunted. That’s basically it.

The ending is a bit ridiculous. The old woman dies, but her soul possesses the body of the heroine’s dead friend, takes Mari hostage, and a war of words ensues. Naturally the boss goes down, friendship wins. The killer dies, the spirits find peace, and the aquarium stops being haunted.

Years later, the heroine’s friend visits and lays a flower for the souls who died unjustly…

Honestly the plot is pretty average—Hong Kong B-movie level—but that doesn’t stop it from being fun. First off, the various Bad Ends: pick wrong and you die in all sorts of ways, and the deaths give you achievements and CGs. Great for gore hounds. Most of the CGs are bloody and violent; there’s one close-up of a ghost with hair all over that gave even me goosebumps. Combined with the eerie BGM and gross slimy sound effects, the immersion is genuinely strong.

As a horror game for thrills, it’s passable. For horror, scaring you is enough. The plot… as long as the haunting makes sense, it’s fine.

The game supposedly has three endings, one True End, which I assume is a forced happy end. Play it if you’re interested.

All in all, しずくのおと -fall into poison- delivers solid immersion, fun choices and Bad End challenges, and scary sound effects and CGs. It’s definitely worth playing. The lack of voice acting is a big letdown, and 42 RMB is a bit expensive—20 or so would be better.

Finally, I looked it up and found this was originally an older doujin game, while the new Steam version just released a few days ago with greatly improved engine and graphics. The publisher really went all out. If you really like it, 42 RMB isn’t too bad…