Despite the word “Maniac” in its title, Junji Ito Maniac: An Infinite Gaol is not a 1:1 adaptation of the 2023 Netflix original net animation (ONA) Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre. While the ONA adapts 20 stories featured in several of Ito’s manga, the upcoming game introduces an entirely new story based on the Netflix series, with collaboration and supervision by Ito himself.
Junji Ito Maniac: An Infinite Gaol puts you in the shoes of an unnamed college student who wakes up in a mysterious Western-style mansion. Suffering from amnesia and armed with nothing but a broken phone, you must navigate the mansion’s plethora of traps, mechanisms, and horrors to escape and get your memory back. Two characters, a young woman who claims to also be trapped in the mansion and a stern female detective, will join in your attempts to escape. As the story unfolds, your character will become drawn to despair and will experience unexplainable phenomena that only he can see.
Speaking of horrors, fans of Ito’s work will be familiar with some of the monsters in An Infinite Gaol. Detached floating heads identical to those in Ito’s The Hanging Balloons story, sentient hair monsters similar to the one in The Long Hair in the Attic, and the headless sculptures from the Headless Sculptures story make an appearance as enemies.
An Infinite Gaol has three core gameplay elements, including exploration, puzzle-solving, and stealth. Exploration is self-explanatory; by exploring the mansion, you will collect clues and items that will aid in restoring your memories and finding a way out. Some of these items won’t give themselves up easily, so a good part of the game involves traditional puzzle-solving that has you flexing your mind muscles to progress.
As you explore and solve puzzles, you will come upon the aforementioned horrors. While the default options are to either run or hide from them using the mansion’s layout and surrounding objects, you can repurpose the traps littered around to your advantage (one good example is to use a bear trap to ensnare a headless sculpture). These traps come with limited uses, however, so choosing when and how to use them becomes a matter of resource management and clever placements.
Junji Ito Maniac: An Infinite Gaol is being developed and produced by Taiwanese game studio Softstar Entertainment, which also made the game adaptations of horror films like The Bridge Curse and Incantation.
Junji Ito Maniac: An Infinite Gaol is currently in development for PC (Steam). Release date is TBD.
Related article: Ito Junji interview featuring the developer of WORLD OF HORROR – Ito talks H.P. Lovecraft, adaptations and future work
