Ikai Review

Ikai is inspired by the darkest tales from Japanese folklore and is set in a feudal era. The game revolves around the priestess of a shrine struggling to defeat the spirits of her past and her present. She soon loses consciousness of her soul and body and falls to the ground; almost dead, almost alive. Without any gods to support her, the priestess needs to face her fears.

Ikai is a psychological horror walking sim where the protagonist cannot defend herself against the evil spirits; she can only run away from the monsters creeping around the area. You’ll roam around a feudal Shinto shrine and find a way to protect it from evil spirits.

The game’s unique mechanic would be its drawing feature. In order to defend and protect yourself from evil spirits roaming around, you need to draw protective seals. With a paintbrush, you need to replicate the design over it. While it might be more efficient on a PC (or maybe even the Nintendo Switch), trying to draw with a controller can prove cumbersome.

Annoyingly, this is another slow-walking sim, but at least the protagonist can run making traversing the areas a bit quickly. While I’m happy they went with a less-known setting, it’s still not scary. At all. I actually laughed during the first few supposed scares. The drawing mechanic is a nice change of defense system but feels cumbersome on a controller. It’s also very short; can be completed in roughly 2 hours.

The game looks fine; the environment is creepy and unsettling but lacks the true scare. This could’ve easily been a late seventh-generation of video game console release. While nothing out of this world, it does what it’s supposed to do… well almost. On the audio side of things, our priestess will something talk to herself; like for example automatically reading signs. The ambient noise is pretty solid and does its far to try and tense the player.

If you’re a fan of walking simulators, Ikai will be right up your alley. It’s a bit rough around the edges and lacks the scares of similar horror games (ex: the terrifying Fatal Frame series), but there are worst ways to spend 2 hours. It could easily be a short game between bigger adventures such as the upcoming The Witcher 3 current-gen update or next year’s Dead Space. There’s nothing overly wrong here, it’s just… tedious.