Yomawari: The Long Night Collection

Both Night Alone and Midnight Shadows offer a survival horror experience built more on the management of building dread and approaching threats, although both do occasionally indulge in cheap (yet effective) jump scares and uses of gore. However, for all its potency, Yomawari: The Long Night Collection's design too often boils down to a repetitive cycle of evasion and exploration, and with a difficulty that's too high for a game built on obtuse layouts and one-shot kills, it can quickly become an exercise in both fear and frustration.

Yomawari: The Long Night Collection is an attractive but ultimately long-winded experience. The hand-drawn backgrounds are beautiful and, alongside the impressive sound effects, manage to build a wonderful level of immersion in the static environments. But with no combat to speak of and very little actual action, you’re forced only to run away from the host of spectres at an achingly slow pace. Stumbling through two disjointed stories is slow going since they hang on just a few scattered, but admittedly fun scares without much other meat on the bone.

The Yomawari: Long Night Collection represents great value with its two-games-in-one package. Despite both games being quite short they represent the horror genre like no other. The tension is often palpable, and feeling of fear while out on the streets is almost constant. The audio may appear to be basic, but it does a stellar job of immersion with small sounds helping to heighten the paranoia that something could be lurking around the corner. The visuals will appeal to fans of a chibi-anime style and really do help lend to gorgeous backdrops and animations. Yomawari: Long Night Collection is well worth a purchase for horror fans.

With their very well-crafted environment, original enemies, plentiful details all around and incentives to exploration, the two games that are part of this set will most certainly appeal to fans of horror, whose taste is more and more addressed in the growing Nintendo Switch library.

"Cuteness can kill."

All told, Yomawari: The Long Night Collection is an enjoyable title for any who want to get into the Halloween spirit and don’t mind a fair amount of darkness and blood. Those who played the original versions on the Vita may wish to give this a pass, but for any who missed out before I highly recommend picking it up.

Yomawari: The Long Night Collection is a survival horror game that is unique because of its gorgeous, and cute, art style. It looks so innocent, but it packs the punch of a deep, depressing story mixed in with sheer horror as you never know when an enemy is going to jump out at you. Both stories follow a very similar plot with the same mechanics and emphasis on stealth - at times it feels like Yomawari 1 and 1.5 rather than 2. You'll also find yourself becoming more and more frustrated as you continue to die over and over again.

Overall the game was good. It was short and sweet to the point. Each game is anywhere from 3-4 hours long and could easily be won in a single playthrough. The jumps are scary and the suspense is killer. Yomawari: The Long Night Collection get my score of 7.5 out of 10 for being cute and frightening.

Although one of the games is quite fun to play, the other is an exercise in frustration that drags down the entire collection. If they are sold separately in the future, purchase Midnight Shadows, as it’s the best one of the two. Otherwise wait for a sale before checking the collection out.

If you go into Yomawari with the right spirit (hah, I had to get one pun in there), both of these games are memorable, beautiful, elegant and often chilling.