Review by Randalf

Old school point and click games are best played on a PC with a mouse… But for whatever reason, the only ones that I’ve ever stuck with till the credits rolled, have been the occasional gimped ports they have received on consoles, where they are played with a clunky semi controller friendly interface.

I don’t know, for whatever reason, either due to nostalgia or due to some kind of undiscovered kink within me, that’s how I like playing them. Which leads me to todays game, because it plays exactly like one of those ports.

In fact, it feels so much like one of those games, that if you slapped a VHS filter on a gameplay capture of it, and told me it was a snippet from an old famicom promotional tape that a company had originally sent out to Japanese convenience stores… I would believe you, and in my opinion, that’s the highest honor a retro throwback can get, feeling like it could have existed during the era in which it emulates…

This, is Occult Case Files, and also a dialogue with the people behind it.

THE GAME

So in the game you play as one half of a duo of paranormal investigators. Your partner for whatever reason, has decided to investigate a house on her own that’s known as the vanishing point, a point where people at certain points of the day, will vanish into thin air.

We enter the house and begin looking for her. Navigation is done in old school NES first person point and click style. You pick an action, and then when you click where to do the action. It might seem very sluggish if you’re not used to these kinds of games, but it’s really not once you get into the groove of it.

There is not a whole lot of story going on in this demo, so let me just step by step show you how to do it. We use the gate key to open the gate. In the room to the north of where we are. In this room there is a hatch and that is where we are going.

Our first obstacle is a bag of trash on the floor. We need something in it, but trying to open it causes a swarm of flies to attack us, which can kill us if we do it too many times.

Looking around the house we find a match, a disgusting ball of hair and a pair of prayer beads. In a room next to where we found the prayer beads, we see a weird silhouette through the shoji doors, and we make that silhouette go away by praying at the nearby alter.

Beyond that shoji door, we find a can of bug spray under a sink, which we of course use on the trash bag in the room where the hatch is, and we get a storage key. I don’t know if this is a mistranslation and if it’s an intentional one, but the storage key opens a door in the kitchen, and inside that, we find the hatch opener thing, and start making our way back.

I say start because on our way, we are attacked by a ghost, and we fend it of by using the prayer beads we picked up earlier. I’m sure we will need to find a lot of these and other ways to kill the ghosts in the final game, and I think it’s a neat way to do combat in this kind of game.

Opening the hatch and making our way up the ladder, we find a noose, a box and a letter.

It is written by someone who saw the vanishing point in action , and they also mention that a lot of other people around town have gone missing as well, and that the local convenience store owner is very suspect and seems like he knows something but doesn’t want to share the information.

The writing trails off and becomes indecipherable, and our protagonist deicides to get out of there, but is assaulted by yet another ghost and then the demo ends.

THE INTERVIEW

But… our story doesn’t end here. I knew I had to talk to the people who were making this thing and so I did and here’s the interview:

R: Alright, my brain has returned from the vanishing point. So who are you? where are you located, how many are people are working on the game and what pets do y'all have

S: I'm Scottie 👋 and I work with my buddy Julian under the name Teebowah Games. We've been friends since the 5th grade back in 2000, I make the art and code while Julian does the music and sound.

I'm located over in Bellingham, WA.

While Julian is over in Annapolis, MD

It's just the two of us for the most part while we get friends and family to help test the games we make.

I have a border collie mix named Sammie who's a bitch and a half, while Julian has a cat named Ruby and Beagle mix named Milton!

Thanks for asking! Hope you enjoyed the demo of our game!

R: oh man you have no idea..... I was very close to digging out a USB NES controller and playing this on the PC I have hooked up to a CRT.

It feels like it straight out of that era, and I have a weird nostalgia for specfically the NES ports of these first person point and click games.

In the promo stuff I've come across, you mention a couple of the more famous adventure games on the NES, but do you have any more obscure inspirations? I get a real Sweet Home vibe in the music and the general vibe of the game.

Is that game an inspiration or do you just happen to look to the same era of film that Sweet Home’s inspiration comes from?

S: I need to get controller support up and running! I'd love to play with an NES myself...

Besides the obvious NES point and click inspirations, Sweet Home was definitely an inspiration! I was looking at the games enemy designs to get a better idea on how we should do ours!

Been meaning to get a copy of SH at some point.

Aside from that, there's a series on Amazon Prime called Tokyo Videos of Horror. It's a bunch of found footage style shorts out of Japan.

There's a few stinkers in the bunch, but a good chunk of them are gold. That and listening to stories and urban legends from folks living over there helped fuel the creation of the game. I just love Japanese culture in general and wanted to see if I could do it justice.

A couple of grammatical errors aside, I think I did ok 😅

R: You definitely succeeded in creating THAT vibe.

A mix of that era of adventure games AND that era of early J horror. I'll definitely be checking out that series!

So what's the biggest obstacle of trying to emulate these old games? Imagine that you have to make some tough decisions between being player friendly and being authentic? I didn't have any issues during my playthrough, but I'm used to these kinds of games, but I'm not sure everyone else is? Do you have any plans for difficulty options and maybe object highlighting, etc.?

S: In terms of player accessibility, we originally had it so that you had to manually take your cursor down to select the interaction you wanted to do every time. While it's faithful to the old style of games, it was a bit archaic, so we added a way to reselect the option with Shift and added a cycle option with Shift and Control. And if THAT wasn't enough, we also set it so the numpad and number keys toggle inventory and commands as well. If that's not enough... haha we'll see if folks need it to be more accessible.

As for difficulty, with the games of the past, they all seemed very brutal in terms of hints, clues, and overall game progression. If you didn't have the latest Nintendo Power, you were out of luck unless you heard of a hint out on the playgrounds haha. That's something we wanted to replicate, but in a different way. For instance, with the ghost. There are multiple ways to defeat him. You can pray three times, use the family photo or the prayer beads. In some of the old games, if you didn't have the right item for the right enemy, you were out of luck. While that may be great for longevity with the game, we just don't like that. So that's something we decided to leave in the past. But with that said, we still want to present some challenge to the game and hopefully it still feels reminiscent to the challenge of the older games.

R: Ahhhh having multiple ways to deal the enemies sounds like it will cut down on a lot of repetition.

I think that's all the questions I have. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. When can people expect to see the game on digital store shelves?

S: Thanks for having us! We're looking at a release sometime in early 2023 if all goes well. Have a good one!

And there you have it, a look at a very promising indie horror game, and an enlightening discussion with a developer that wasn’t afraid to talk about their inspirations. I will definitely be checking out the game when it’s done, and while I wait, I’ll be hunting down that horror series that Scottie suggested.

Until I see you again, from all of us here at horrify.world, take care and goodnight!