You Should Play: Aka Manto | 赤マント

Chilla’s Art’s Aka Manto is in many ways a superior game to its successor, Yuki Onna. Yet it does a splendid job at rivalling its inspiration, Puppet Combo’s Nun Massacre, one of my all time favourite Horror games.

The setup of Aka Manto is simple and quite stupid, in the way Horror conceits often are. You play as a girl who has been bullied to come into an abandoned school complex late at night, supposedly just because one of the bullies’ boyfriends took a passing interest in you. So, on a dark, stormy night, you plow through sheets of rain and enter into the school.

The school complex is wretched, a thoroughly grotesque charade of an actual school. Much like Nun Massacre’s school complex, the school of Aka Manto is long abandoned, and filled with reminders of the failings of the staff there. Tapes scattered around the school tell a story of a bullied student trying to get enough evidence to put the bully away for good. Negligent staff turn a blind eye; in the end, it is the failings of authority figures that doom us to repeat these twisted expeditions into hellish, abandoned sites.

And hellish it is indeed, thanks to the presence of the eponymous Aka Manto creature, lifted straight from Japanese folk stories. An unearthly tall, eerily quiet figure in a red cape with a white mask, Aka Manto wields a butcher’s knife and pursues you, screeching, down the looping school hallways. It is a truly awful creature, but one very much building on the even-awfuller Nun from Nun Massacre. Make no mistake, Nun Massacre is very much the blueprint, right down to the way that Aka Manto moves and acts. Yet, the game does enough to differentiate itself by remixing the puzzles and the layout – as well as adding a few small tricks to your pursuer’s moveset.

Aka Manto has a few helpers around the place. It sends copies of its masks floating down the halls, which act as spies or alarms. Aka Manto is truly relentless, but is only scripted to appear in one specific place once. Once you get that glimpse of them behind a set of bars, they could be anywhere at any time. That is a haunting thought, and one that makes you increasingly paranoid and uneasy.

My favourite moment in the game is whenever the school bell goes off. It’s just such a haunting sound, one that rolls around the cavernous classrooms so easily, that it makes me hide in a cupboard almost every time. Is it a signal that Aka Manto is doing something? Powering up? Getting angrier? Or is it just another thing that refuses to die, a part of that environment that continues on despite everything else? There is no way to be sure.

There’s also the matter of its graphical quality to attend to – and suffice it to say, I think it’s one of the best uses of the PSX style out there. The low draw distance gives everything that dreamy quality, and watching as textures shift on the wall to accommodate your changing perspective – that makes everything feel nightmarish. It leverages the old to create something new, making a grimy school that simply could not be done as effectively with a realistic graphical style.

The difficulty of recommending Aka Manto is, well, the difficulty. Death is quick and cheap, and despite the presence of a few healing items, it’s not enough to stave off more than a few attacks from the red-cloaked menace. And when you die, it’s right back to the start of the game for you. With no saves, Aka Manto as a game is a forbidding presence. Make no mistake – it’s fun to figure out the solution to limited-inventory item puzzles, moving around the entirety of the school complex, hoping you’re bringing the right items to the right place – but it’s not much fun to lose all your progress when Aka Manto kills you.

There’s a distinct uncertainty to Aka Manto, wherein every exit from the vent system could result in your untimely demise. This is very good at creating genuine tension, but it can also feel like very artificial tension. When it deflates, it’s not necessarily a satisfying “oh, you got me!” kind of elated come-down from a scary moment. When you die, it can often feel a bit miserable – particularly if you’re playing the game to beat it. Nun Massacre is a bit easier to understand, and a bit easier to finish. But when you stop playing Aka Manto as something to blaze through and beat, I think you uncover something else.

It starts to become a game about holding on to hope in desperate maneuvers. You try to grasp at life for a few more precious moments, even as you spend those moments in a ghoul-infested school, death itself shrieking at your heels. When you stop playing it to win, you begin to appreciate the weirdness of it all. And you begin to appreciate that there are some mysteries you may never get to the bottom of. That’s okay.

It doesn’t necessarily make for good game design, but it achieves something different, certainly. Something that most games won’t, with their ability to save, and their desire for the player to actually beat the game. Given that Aka Manto hates the player, hates the person playing the game, wants them to fail in profoundly horrible ways – it is remarkable I walked away from it feeling positively about the experience. Part of that may be the genuine fear I felt while trying to survive, but it’s also an appreciation for a game that at least dared to rebel. Like Nun Massacre, it doesn’t have saves, but unlike Nun Massacre, progress is harder-won and the game feels much longer. The layout doesn’t map as well for me, and I find myself getting more and more lost the deeper inside I get.

It is hard to recommend fully, but for anyone interested in the Horror genre and how Horror game design can work, Aka Manto is a fascinating example that opposes most traditional game design decisions. It is slow, it is often unpredictable to such a degree that fear and frustration mix in equal measure, and yet it is still intoxicating. Well worth a look – if just to experience something a bit different.