My Experience With Ao Oni
Out in the countryside lay an abandoned mansion. You and your friends enter it, intrigued by rumours of a monster. The main hall of the mansion was dead silent with no sign of any āmonsterā. Of course, thereās no monster, you think, it is not scientifically possible for one to exist!
Then, the main door locks itself.
Then, a plate shatters the eerie silence. You take a trip to the kitchen to investigate. Upon returning to the hall, your friends have vanished. Now, you must find your friends and escape the mansionās expansive grounds, with a growing presence of evil stalking youā¦
Ao Oni is an indie horror game published in 2008 by Japanese developer nprops with the RPG Maker game engine. It was quite popular during the early Letās Play era of YouTube, with Pewdiepie and Markiplier covering the game. While itās been reduced to obscurity over the years, Ao Oni has a surprisingly strong following in Japan. In addition to the games, Ao Oni was adapted into two movies, an anime, and even a novel series!
I remember coming across Ao Oni through YouTube, and for some reason, this game stuck with me. It could have been the memes, could have been just how entertaining the Letās Plays were, or for some other reason. I ārediscoveredā Ao Oni during the previous Steam Winter Sale, intrigued by the low price of $2.70 CAD and the wish to try something different before taking on Arkham Knight. So with that, I bought the game and gave Ao Oni a whirl.
To escape, you have to navigate the property by using items found throughout the mansion by using items and solving puzzles to open doors and unlock new items. Occasionally, youād run into your friends who are also trying to escape Ao Oni, the big blue demon who stalks the grounds. More than occasionally, Ao Oni will locate and chase you down! You have to escape him by getting far enough to be out of sight or by hiding in a closet before he enters the room. Otherwise, well, you die.
The chase scenes are a bit annoying with how frequent they are, but in my opinion its fear-inducing suddenness is the best part of the game. One moment youāre navigating a hallway with something on your mind, and then WHAM! The big blue son-of-a-bitch appears out of thin air and is marching towards you like a heat-seeking missile! The tense chase music amplifies panic as you hastily get away from Ao Oni, and heading into a dead-end leads to almost-certain death. And when that music fades out, you can breathe a sigh of relief. The environment was pretty interesting, especially the basement and annex areas. The background music prevails in inducing an unsettling ambience with the clever idea of incorporating a heartbeat.
As for my biggest ick with this gameā¦ the damn puzzles.
The puzzles involved finding codes to lockers or retrieving an item, mostly by finding some sort of pattern in the environment. My God, they were hard. It could be that I am a dumbass. It could be that I am too used to how much more lenient modern games are with puzzles. Regardless of the reason, I had to use a walkthrough for most of them as I was frequently stumped by these puzzles, and it did take away from the experience.
The story and the characters were pretty non-existent, and to be honest? Itās not designed to be a story-driven game, and thatās ok, although I do think there is (well, was) a bit of potential to drop nuggets of lore on stuff like the origins of Ao Oni. But itās not a big deal, the current IP holders, Litmus, are gonna take suggestions from a website which isnāt even indexed by Google as of writing š.
For a game that took 4.5 hours to complete (and could have easily been shorter if I wasnāt an idiot) and cost $2.70 CADā¦ it was a decent buy. The ambience of the game seeped in a sense of horror, and I found the chase scenes, when not overdone, pretty startling. The puzzles do require a bit more brainpower than I possess, and a walkthrough should be handy when you play.
I think 3 stars feels like an appropriate rating: Itās cheap on sale, short, spooky, but the puzzles were pretty unintuitive.
Interestingly, the Steam version is quite different from the original version of the game. The Ao Oni fanbase seems to consider the Steam version as inferior to the original, which is interesting. The original version is available for free, and you can find it linked in this Reddit thread. I havenāt tried it, but maybe I should if it really is better than the Steam versionā¦