BrokenLore: LOW is the first of a series of psychological horror games by Serafini Productions. With four games currently in development, I was concerned that this indie developer had potentially taken too much on their plate at once. However, these are very short games, with LOW being just an hour long. Which then raised the question of whether an hour was too short and if a full story with a satisfying conclusion could be told in this time.
LOW is set in the Japanese village of Kirisame-mura and is inspired by Japanese folklore, notably the Gashadokuro (rattling skeleton). We play as Naomi, who is meeting a producer called Hideki in Kirisame-mura to launch her music career. The stakes are high as Naomi is not the only one competing for Hideki’s approval, raising the pressure for everything to be perfect. As we walk through the seemingly endless, foggy streets of Kirisame-mura, something doesn’t seem right as the well known spirit that haunts the town is seemingly active.
LOW is mostly a walking simulator, though it does feature two sections where we must collect items while being chased by a creature. Though I don’t usually like gameplay segments in walking simulators, I think these were well done and helped to spread out the story elements. One thing I will say about the gameplay is that I wished there had been some more interiors to explore as the majority of the game takes place in the same, mostly uninteresting, street loop of Kirisame-mura, seemingly inspired by P.T.‘s gameplay loop, whereas Naomi’s dialogue suggests she’s been exploring more and learning about the village’s tales. It would have been nice to see more environmental storytelling that would help give some background to the folklore that’s being covered here.
In terms of the storyline, it is interesting and doesn’t fall into the usual tropes of horror games, instead telling something that was genuinely interesting and also didn’t outstay its welcome. Again, here it would have been nicer to see more detail. While I liked the ambiguity of the story as a lot of it is left up to the player’s interpretation, there was one element to it concerning Naomi’s rival which I felt was abandoned in order to move onto the next section. There were also some strange dialogue pieces where Hideki asked Naomi is she had seen the village’s spirit yet, seemingly unbothered by the event and Naomi also didn’t seem concerned by this.
Visually, LOW looks great besides character facial expressions, though this is understandable with a low budget project. The creature designs are quite creepy and I also enjoyed the low-poly segment of the game which helped to switch the gameplay up to keep things interesting. However one major problem I had was with the brightness. To begin with, the misty Silent Hill-esque look of Kirisame-mura worked well, but come nightfall the game was so dark that I could barely see anything. Turning the gamma setting up helped but then I had to keep turning it down again when the lighting brightened up. As mentioned earlier, I also wished there had been more to the environmental design, such as some objects of interest or maybe signs or other literature to read or interact with while walking up and down the street.
While the audio design was incredibly unnerving with some awful sounds that I’ve never heard before, there were some points where my character was producing two sets of footsteps so that it sounded like someone was walking beside me. But asides from that, the audio helped to grow tension in the game really well, especially with the ambient soundtrack that would spike during intense moments.
While the storyline and audio design were great, the most standout element of LOW was definitely Elsie Lovelock’s performance as Naomi. She did a fantastic job and made every situation sound concerningly realistic. When a game has so much focus on the story, the voice acting can really make or break the experience and Lovelock’s performance certainly made the whole experience so much more impactful, especially considering the darker themes covered by the game.
Overall, BrokenLore: LOW is a fairly enjoyable psychological horror game to settle down with for an hour and sets up the rest of the series well. While it could have done with more work on a technical aspect, it’s very compelling in its story and its cast has also done a fantastic job bringing the characters to life. I can certainly see this series being a great anthology bundle set once it’s completed.
Jess reviewed BrokenLore: LOW on PC with a provided review copy.
