Solo developer Jamsanpoid and publisher VampireK.K. shadowdropped their new horror escape puzzle game Toganeyobi on January 28, for PC (Steam). The game follows protagonist Yuki Hachisuka, who is forced to accept the sketchy, but high-paying job of “connecting to 11 numbers on an old phone booth at 2:00AM.” While it may sound simple, making a single mistake could lead to some scary consequences.
In a recent interview with Game*Spark, Jamsanpoid discussed the “horror-pop” worldview and visuals of Toganeyobi, and shared their experience with making scary games as someone who’s easily scared and can’t deal with horror.
“I’m really bad with horror,” Jamsanpoid says. “Back when I was in middle school, playing the Boo stage in Super Mario 64 once caused me to have diarrhea for 2 hours non-stop. Even still, for me, the beauty of horror lies in ‘encountering the unknown,’ ‘feeling the presence of the supernatural,’ i.e. ‘a uniquely elegant worldview.’ My goal with creating content has always been to depict such an eerie kind of worldview that’s both dreadful and charming.”
The reason behind this grotesque blend of cute, colorful visuals and horror is because “the target audience for my games will always be myself,” Jamsanpoid explains. “It was necessary to create a compelling worldview with a soothing, cute and pop art style so that even a man who gets 2-hour-long diarrhea attacks after being faced with horror would want to play my game. But also, I just genuinely love seeing cute characters suffer.”
The game does contain some jumpscares and creepy anomalies that change the appearance of the phone booth, though according to the developer, they were added to spice things up, since staying in the phone booth for so long “might end up being a terrible bore” for a lot of people. Returning to the topic of not being good with horror, Jamsanpoid explains that it was not easy for them to play the game even though they were the one who made it. However, it is precisely because they’re not good with horror that they were able to make it feel scary.
“The truth is, I’m a big coward so I don’t want the jumpscares to exist. When I’m playing the game, I don’t want the anomalies to happen. Even during test plays, it made me utterly spooked. But I think that people who are not good with horror may be the ones who best understand what others are afraid of,” Jamsanpoid remarks.
“But just because I made a horror game doesn’t mean that it raised my tolerance to horror,” they jokingly add. “Even though I’m aware that a person will appear in the junction mirror and come for me, I still get spooked.”
Toganeyobi is out for PC (Steam). Note that the game is currently only available in Japanese.
