Developer: Ichimatsu Suzuka
Publisher: Kodansha
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
BAN: The Prologue of GUCHA GUCHA – Review
BAN: The Prologue of GUCHA GUCHA is a third-person horror adventure game by sole developer Ichimatsu Suzuka. This Japanese indie dev is well-known for his absurd and surrealistic horror games, with his previous games doing well in terms of Steam reviews. But what we are looking at today is actually a prologue, as the title might have you guess. BAN contains about an hour of gameplay that is meant to introduce us to the world we’ll get to explore in the upcoming game GUCHA GUCHA. It’s time to see how badly searching for our dog can go wrong!
Story
A brief blurb of text at the start introduces us to Yuki, a college student who recently moved to a city called Utagacho. As she is walking her dog Chocolat through the nearby woods in the evening, she is attacked by a strange monster. Yuki manages to escape because her brave dog fends off the creature, though Chocolat himself disappears into the undergrowth of the mountain too. Thus, it is up to Yuki to venture into the deserted town that strangely seems to be built into the woods, and uncover the horrid history of the town while searching for her pet.
Later on, you also briefly play as a young boy who has to evade a man while carrying his baby sister to safety, after said man murdered their mother. This part of the game is a lot more surrealistic since it does not give us the needed context to understand what’s happening, and it just throws a bunch of chaotic cutscenes at us and calls it a day.
Graphics
There is no reason to beat around the bush, BAN: The Prologue of GUCHA GUCHA is not a good-looking game. Even for what we’re used to from Unreal Engine 5, the game looks cheaply made and the animations are choppy. The character models are ugly and we experienced severe graphical glitches and lag when trying to play the game. Some segments looked okay, especially some of the cutscenes that embraced the oddity of the style and setting. And we did enjoy the general aesthetic, which uses vibrant colors and has a classic ‘ancient Japan’ look. But overall, we found this game to be somewhat of an eyesore. We should also note that some portions of the game were not translated despite us playing the English version.
Sound
Ichimatsu Suzuka is known for composing all of his own music for his games and we enjoyed that a lot more than the quality of the graphics. The soundtrack was equally chaotic but in a fun way. The game had some Japanese voice acting, and the performances were fine. The voice acting was only present during some dialogues. The game did deafen us during the jumpscares once or twice, but nothing much to complain about here in terms of sound design.
Gameplay
As mentioned, BAN: The Prologue of GUCHA GUCHA is a third-person horror adventure game. The gameplay is very simple, mainly consisting of the character walking around to explore areas and sometimes solving easy puzzles by finding items and using them at the correct place. The open-world feel of the game was enjoyable, though a little bit more direction would have been nice since it’s easy to get lost or not know where you’re supposed to go next. Or at least a map would have helped. Luckily, items you can interact with or pick up had a bright glow to them, which was a good way to differentiate them from the environment.
Obviously, a horror game wouldn’t be complete without a scary threat chasing you down. In BAN, you cannot fight back against the monsters and ghosts, so you will have to get through by sneaking or running away to evade them. Your character only has limited stamina, indicated by a bar with a lung icon near the top of the screen, so carefulness is a must. If you do get caught, expect to be subjected to a horrible cheap jumpscare and lose a bunch of your progress.
Nothing this game does is really new when it comes to the genre, which is a bit of a letdown. We hope to see more innovative gameplay in GUCHA GUCHA itself since Ichimatsu Suzuka is usually more creative when it comes to mechanics, at least when looking at his previous works. The game is relatively short, and you’ll be able to complete it easily in less than an hour.
Conclusion
While BAN: The Prologue of GUCHA GUCHA has some interesting glances into a cool story that could unfold and a unique aesthetic, we really can’t recommend this one. The graphics are messy, the game feels thrown together, and for how short it is we find the price of nearly 9 Euros to be ridiculously high. Especially considering the amount of bugs this game has even after several patches. Hopefully, GUCHA GUCHA itself will be a more refined product.
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