Review GigaDeathNullGolem 3/5 · Jul 1, 2023
Interesting, But Not That Much Fun to Play
Been meaning to play a few maze shooters at some point that have some historical interest (with the main attraction being the game Space Shadow with it's unique Light Gun peripheral) and I randomly happened up this and it looked too interesting to pass up, with it's Lovecraft-inspired horror theme. Knowing it wouldn't be too long I decided to take …
Been meaning to play a few maze shooters at some point that have some historical interest (with the main attraction being the game Space Shadow with it's unique Light Gun peripheral) and I randomly happened up this and it looked too interesting to pass up, with it's Lovecraft-inspired horror theme. Knowing it wouldn't be too long I decided to take a look.
Insmouse No Yakata (Also known as Insmouse no Yakata or "The House of Innsmouth) is a supposedly-inspired-by-Lovecraft game. These maze-type FPS you'd see every now and then in the mid 90's (similar to that such as Faceball 2000) You don't really need to know any Japanese to play this... As everything is pretty self explanatory. you pick up bullets in groups of six, you shoot with one button, reload with the other, and you use the twin D-Pads of the Virtual Boy to move and move your on-screen gun reticle around, making this similar to many on-screen reticle shooters of previous eras (such Operation Wolf)
Gameplay is really simplistic. Shoot stuff as you make your way to the next level (which is always locked with a key that you must find) Search for the white orb that reveals map, and the black orb that reveals location of all items. Youi have a Dungeon Master-styled Map when you press select to see all these things marked, as well as rooms you've already explored.)
Ultimately its not a very involved or fun experience. Clearing levels is somewhat mechanical and your ability to do it is really random... A Successful run has you moving through 13 maps, randomly selected out of 50 available, and every time you start any level, the powerups, monsters (and key) is in a random spot.
Youi can't clear levels (they come back!) and you have a timer, so the goal is to just rush to find the exit. Save states make this fairly simple, Otherwise you'll need some real luck to complete this.
You have a password system as well, so even if you lose, the game restarts and you can just load the last level you were at. Everything will be in different positions (but the map will be the same) so you have another shot at it.
Ultimately this is just a repetitive game. I didn't really like particularly anything about it other than how weird the tone is compared to everything else on virtual boy that was clearly overseen carefully by Nintendo... Then there is this. Something more on tone with the kinds of adult-ish games you'd see for PC-98. But oh there's nothing like that other than really creepy looking monsters.
The game features multiple endings. Which path you take is selected automatically based on how fast you clear a level. Neat for replayability but doesn't really offer a satisfying sense of accomplishment.
The Maze Shooter genre was something you'd see on home consoles every so often and I don't think the genre was ever really well received and seemed to fade out over a few years as First Person Shooting games grew in popularity due to Affordable computers with hardware acceleration GPU technology that made any such gimmicks that tried to shoehorn such titles into cartridges for such consoles during the 16-bit era a short lived endeavor.