Honoguraki Toki no Hate yori (仄暗き時の果てより) Review

Honestly, I never paid much attention to Kure Ichiro before. It was last year’s Sakuranomori†Dreamers that got me interested in him.

So in under a year, Kure put out another game: Kuraki Toki no Hate Yori (From the End of the Dark Hours), and judging by the promo art, it’s another horror route. For someone who loves ghost stories, that’s a thrill. And last time Kure started strong and fizzled out, but it was still passable in the end — he had to have learned something this time, right? So I started playing.

Playing a horror game in the middle of New Year’s atmosphere — I gotta say, I felt pretty badass.

Finished it. How do I put this… If Sakuranomori†Dreamers was a strong start with a weak finish, this one is… the late-game developments are just too explosive.

There are three heroines: the protagonist’s detective boss, a girl he meets on the island named Inui Komako, and his little sister, Oshiro Yuno.

But in reality… only the sister matters. The others are whatever. So I’ll skip the bullshit and get to the main body.

The prologue starts with the protagonist, an assistant to a private detective, returning with her to his hometown island to take a job from a family: find a missing girl.

The funny thing is, the girl this family is looking for isn’t theirs. Their own daughter, Kyoko, was found brutally murdered in the mountains about five years ago — head missing. And Kyoko was the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend.

The protagonist and his detective boss are puzzled. You want to find someone, why look for someone unrelated to your family? Then the protagonist remembers how Kyoko died. He and Kyoko were dating, she said yes, and then one day at the summer festival, Kyoko called him up the mountain and asked for a round. They did it, and the next day Kyoko was dead on the mountain, headless…

So the protagonist figures the mountain on this island has to be messed up. Maybe a yokai? A monster? A serial killer? And so the investigation begins.

Naturally the investigation is completely useless. One night on the mountain he spots some bizarre monster-like thing, runs away, and then on the third day or whatever, the protagonist suddenly realizes the whole island is wrong… zombies. Everywhere.

Yeah, the bite-you-and-you-turn kind. The story turns into Left 4 Dead — the protagonist and his detective boss run for their lives, fail, the whole island becomes zombies, and the protagonist gets surrounded.

So the prologue is a Bad End. After it ends, the protagonist opens his eyes and he’s back to when he first arrived on the island. He’s time leaped for no reason, like in 3Days, and he keeps his memories.

Keeping his memories makes things easy. Second playthrough, he investigates again and finds that the missing girl is locked in a basement. The one holding her is the adoptive brother of one of the heroines, Inui Komako — a surgeon on the surface, a murderous freak underneath. He kidnapped the girl, tied her up in the basement, and tortured her in every way.

He even says: “This girl is really special. No matter how I cut her, she won’t die.”

After several time leaps, the protagonist finally finds the client and they go to rescue the girl together. The client says something very suggestive:

“Get that girl out now. If she’s not out by tomorrow, this island is finished.”

The protagonist remembers the zombie crisis from the first loop and figures the client definitely knows something.

A few more time leaps later, he deals with the psycho surgeon, rescues the girl, and then forces the girl to tell him what the client knows.

Cornered, the client talks. He says he’ll take the protagonist to meet his real wife, and that the wife at his house is a fake.

In a bunker in a mountain ravine, the protagonist meets the client’s real wife — a monster… or more like the Nemesis from Resident Evil 3?

Further down, there are several coffin-like tanks with corpses lying inside. The girl they just rescued climbs into one of the coffin things herself.

The client explains. His wife is one of the “ancient ones” that existed on Earth — a race superior to humans, who created humans as… food. His wife needs to eat people to survive. Early on she could maintain human form, but as she aged she couldn’t hold it anymore, went mad, and reverted to her original monster form.

The client loved his wife deeply — even as a monster. But as one of the ancient ones, she’d lived thousands of years and forgotten how to hunt. She might not even be able to kill anyone anymore, and with nothing to eat she’d starve.

So the client researched and developed something like a virus. Infect a human, and in a day or two they turn into a zombie. The zombies get eaten easily by his wife, she gets food, and her life extends by +1s. So the client was behind everything.

As for why they had to rescue the girl: she was already infected and about to turn. They needed to drag her back and feed her to the wife. If she got out and ran around infecting people, it’d be a disaster — and the client didn’t want things to get that big. That’s how the first-loop tragedy happened.

Then the protagonist realizes something even more fucked up: the client is his ex-girlfriend’s father. So was his ex also a monster? She died, head gone — did her mother eat it?

The protagonist time leaps again, back to before his ex was killed. She cheerfully admits she’s half monster, half human, so she won’t starve for a while. But as someone with monster blood, she fell in love with the protagonist, and the more she loved him the more twisted it got. And in every route, the protagonist never chooses her — he always picks another woman. So in the end she can only follow the course of history and kill Kyoko…

Whether you go for the detective boss or Inui Komako, the ending is the same: the protagonist time leaps to solve their personal problems, kills Kyoko himself, the client gets eaten by his wife, all tragedies end, and everyone lives happily ever after…

It’s a bit forced, but it passes. Still, something feels off. All that, and it just resolves like that?

Of course, that’s not the True End. The True End is even more twisted.

The True End is the sister’s route, Oshiro Yuno. At first it’s the same as the other heroine routes — chasing the killer, finding the girl the client wants. But near the end, the sister notices something wrong with herself.

She has a memory of killing Kyoko five years ago, and it seems suspicious.

She also remembers another set of memories: she… has no brother. Sometimes her father says, “If we’d had a boy, we’d have named him Koichi.” Koichi is the protagonist’s name — her brother’s name.

In other words, there is only a sister, no brother. As the story goes on, the protagonist also notices strange things — like how his sister seems to have died long ago. She went out mushroom picking one day, fell off a cliff, and hung dead on a tree. But there’s definitely a sister beside him now, so that’s fine.

Meaning there’s a world with only the sister and no brother, and a world with only the brother and no sister.

So the game starts a rough back-and-forth reveal, continuing to the very last moment, all narrated by the sister.

This island has divine power — some ancient god resides here, and the sister is one of them, or got possessed somehow. She has divine power too. At school she met someone named “Kyoko,” and they hit it off instantly, drawn to each other — maybe because Kyoko has monster blood and the sister has divine blood. Sometimes the sister hears about things like “if only I had a brother,” so she uses her power to cross into a world where her brother exists.

And as a being with divine power, the sister can’t feel emotions. Her body is like Kyoko’s monster body. But to have love and feelings, in one world where her brother exists, she killed Kyoko, ate Kyoko’s head, and gained Kyoko’s memories and some of her emotions. That also explains why the protagonist said his ex died horribly at the start.

Kyoko doesn’t understand and asks the sister who she really is.

The sister says she is “the chaos residing in XXX.” If that doesn’t make sense, maybe this will:

The chaos that always crawls up to you with a smile, Nyaruko-san♪

Yeah, the sister is a monster from Nyaruko’s mythology, at least in this game.

Kyoko still doesn’t get it and asks what the sister’s relationship is with the protagonist — her brother.

The sister explains: their mother’s pregnancy had a 50/50 chance of a girl or a boy. If a boy, it’s the protagonist. If a girl, it’s her. And because she has power, she crossed into the world where “mother gave birth to a boy” and became his sister. If it didn’t make sense, she’d just time leap over and over and pull strings until her existence became reasonable.

So this game is about a sister using her divine power to cross into the worldline where “mother gave birth to a boy,” playing the role of that boy’s sister, and time leaping many times to make her existence fit.

Meanwhile that boy — the protagonist — is also time leaping nonstop to pursue his sister, or his ex, or whatever, for a Happy End.

A pair of siblings both time leaping. That also explains why the protagonist can time leap: the protagonist is the sister from a different worldline. They’re essentially the same person. So in the sister route’s ending, the protagonist is fucking himself…

The CG quality is beyond question — the zombies are drawn with relish, they just aren’t scary. It lacks the horror atmosphere of Sakuranomori†Dreamers. The music is… on the same level as Sakuranomori†Dreamers. Same system too, the moonstone family engine. It’s fine.

It’s just the story…

About the story, I honestly can’t even. First, the ending developments are too explosive and too fast. But the final conversation between the sister and Kyoko by the sea already made me go Boom several times. Second, the game’s word choices are weird — Sino-Japanese coinages everywhere, and my brain exploded reading it. Third, the game once again makes all the earlier atmosphere completely pointless. You spend the whole time thinking it’s a serial killer, zombies, a virus, whatever. Turns out that’s all bullshit — it’s all because one man wanted to extend his monster wife’s life. And just as you’re marveling at the monster wife, she turns out to be bullshit too. There’s a sister constantly crossing over and changing history, while another sister’s brother is also constantly crossing over and changing history…

Kure’s performance in this one, personally… at least in terms of pacing, it’s worse than Sakuranomori†Dreamers. The common route made me forget this was a Japanese game. It reads like a Hong Kong B-grade horror Category III film — something like The Untold Story, maybe. Unlike Sakuranomori†Dreamers’s approach of building horror atmosphere, Kuraki Toki no Hate Yori feels more like hard-boiled style with horror elements thrown in: zombies, blood spray, tentacles, monsters, and so on. To me it’s less scary, though I can’t rule out that some people are into that.

The game’s description is scattered, with several time leaps, and it felt jumpy. And aside from the True End, the other routes aren’t interesting. Think about it — it’s a horror game, but the protagonist can save and load at will. The visuals have zombies and monsters, but the developments follow a Resident Evil-ish pattern. And with Resident Evil 7 being popular lately, why would I play this instead of RE? A text game can’t match the impact anyway…

So at one point I was ready to drop it. Then in the late True End, it suddenly drops a huge bomb and I’m left stunned.

The True End basically changes what the game is. It explains why the protagonist time leaps, describes why the sister exists, and comes up with a fairly novel premise — crossing into another worldline to fuck yourself.

But that’s all it is. Kure built an impressive framework but still didn’t write it well. At least next time… don’t write B-grade horror movie content, okay?

“On this mad island, the one who pursues their own destiny.” The sister’s final words still ring in my ears. So this game shouldn’t be called “From the End of the Dark Hours” — it should be called “From the End of Your Sister.”