Publisher: SEGA of America, Inc.
Developer: SEGA Enterprises Ltd.
Single Player
Sega Saturn
Some video games, as I go into the journey of mine into the medium, will just be doomed to being obsolete, and this is one such example. First of all this is the Sega Saturn release, very different from the Sega CD game of this franchise. A work meant to push "full motion video", a craze at this point, if this was released today on a digital gaming store it would be mauled as much as I hope people would like it too. It lasts only an hour or less, if you know how to progress forwards, there are no real puzzles, with only a few traps, and it would be mocked for the English dub and animation on online video game review videos. Some would argue, even back in the nineties, this was not a video game but an interactive movie, a dead-end for the medium in where to go.
Weirdly however, this is a SEGA property, a reminder they have an eccentric past they sadly tend to brush under the carpet, not really accessible beyond Sonic the Hedgehog and a few older titles. They made idiosyncratic productions over the years, and the original Mansion of Hidden Souls, a prequel to the Saturn version, was an experiment in its own right too. Part of two attempts to keep their successful Mega Drive/Genesis console afloat in later years, the console which got SEGA some success when it did well outside of Japan, the SEGA CD was to introduce technological advantages that CD technology allowed such as full motion video. On the Saturn, fully embracing the CD software, and in a schism between whether the console (as originally) was meant for 2D pixels or the new and trendy 3D polygons, The Mansion of Hidden Souls I played, actually a sequel to the first in one plot twist, was an early title in the console's release. It is both amazing to think SEGA both funded this weird little piece of quasi-game, and that I can attest to the fact, on the box of our family owned European Saturn, this was used to sell the console alongside Panzer Dragoon (1995).
The weirdness is striking, sold on its interactive polygonal animation, knowing Mansion... consists of you walking around a small two story environment. A few rooms, with disembodied character heads talking to you. You can look closer at certain spots, only a handful you can count on one hand, and you use the A and C buttons on the Saturn controller to reply yes or no to any character mid-conversation. (Easy mode allows for a prompt for when to do this). You have an inventory, but there are no puzzles beyond remembering where everyone's room is, and checking each one (and the few places for clues) to continue. That's it. The challenge is, with limited space, knowing what to do, but this is not the dense head scratching weirdness of some point-n-click adventures. You are even told in dialogue where the go next most of the time and the only game overs are a single handful, the pair of them you could miss if you used common sense to succeed, such as using a magical crystal when asked for by a friend against a villain.
But I cannot help but be charmed by this. It is not truly a game, but as an interactive short story, even its really dated animation charms me. Not really horror, more a supernatural drama, this follows from the Sega CD game, which was more with threat as a young male has to rescue his sister from the supernatural manor of the title, after she is turned into a butterfly. Here, the manor is not a threat, but where instead souls live ageless as butterflies, able (by way of fully animated human faces) to be themselves. Your protagonist, a faceless and voiceless figure named June, is tasked by the Manor's elder alongside my namesake Michael, one of the other souls there, to investigate why the moon that night has turned blood red. Early into this narrative, meeting all the denizens of the manor, Michael's room is ransacked and a book he borrowed from the Elder is stolen. What is a minor concern escalates when the manor is at risk of disappearing, and the souls dying, because one of them wishes to become human again using that book's knowledge. It is a slight narrative, and most of this plays out negotiating the manor, with left and right to turn, forwards to enter doors or focus on specific spots.
The denizens are tropes. The older mystic woman you can be given tarot cards from, which have no game use but vary per card drawn in a room. A young girl who came from a broken home named Cathy, a child in a pink room with toys with blonde pig tails. A rugged man, whose room is a shooting gallery, who is viewed as a suspect early on, a nervous young man who is almost a boy and keeps Venus flytraps, and a male adventurer who waxes with regret on his past life lost in a room full of his memories. The English dub voice acting is not great, the animation disembodied heads stiff in the modern day. One not mentioned, Nezumi, is an Asian character in a Japanese produced game who yet, with his thin red nose and dubbed accent, comes off as a stereotype who needs to be bartered with for information.
The shortness of the game, even if it has a save system in a room by form of a diary, means this narrative is truncated unless you wander up and down the manor trying to figure out the limited options of where to go, in a fuzzy 3D animation of pre-rendered images you transition between. You can anger your cast by accusing them, and those Venus flytraps can lead to a game over. The narrative conclusion, facing the cause in the manor's secret dimension, a crystal field, leads to just a very long cut scene including a female villainess we have never seen until then, and a fully rendered animated sequence, likely over ten minutes long or near, made from early 90s game polygons then any further interactive sequences.
Never was there a game that was an acquired taste. I would even say, if a game at all, it is something completely alien of another era. This however was my own personal pleasure in this case, one worthy to preserve as a true curiosity, something which is sweet and a short burst. You think of where the likes of the vaporwave movement came from, nostalgia that reuses dated old technology and imagery from the likes of this, but actually playing this sort of game is a very different experience from merely pastiching it. You have to deal with their potential flaws and technology, but when it works, you get the personal experience I got here, one enough to be intoxicated by as I was with this game.
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