Twilight Syndrome: Tansaku Hen is a horror adventure game for the PlayStation that marks the beginning of the Twilight Syndrome series. Players control three high school girls—Yukari, Mika, and Chisato—as they investigate urban legends and dark secrets within their school. The game features chapter-based narratives and gameplay focused on exploration and dialogue choices, eschewing traditional inventory and combat mechanics.
Every high-school has its own dark secrets. Well, maybe not every; but in Japan, this seems to be a rather popular theme. Mysterious disappearances, ghostly photographs, untimely deaths, eerie sounds coming out of the music room - all these things attract the curiosity of three high-school girls: Yukari, Mika, and Chisato. At night, armed with nothing but a flashlight, the trio of heroines enters the dark school building, prepared to explore every corner, and investigate every urban legend they have heard of...
Tansaku-hen opens the Twilight Syndrome horror adventure series, defining its stylistic traits and gameplay. The game is divided into chapters, each dedicated to a particular `ghostly` story. Unlike most Japanese-style adventures, there is physical character navigation in the game; the player moves digitized images of the three girls on 2D backgrounds, in a manner somewhat similar to side-scrolling games - though many areas feature a third dimension, like in Western third-person perspective adventures.
The gameplay consists of two activities only: walking and occasionally choosing a dialogue option and/or action, as prompted by the game's narrative. There is no other kind of interaction, no inventory, and no combat. Different choices may lead to different endings; the next chapter can be accessed only if the player has not attained the `bad` ending.
Twilight Syndrome: Tansaku-hen abandons the nearly omnipresent anime/manga graphical style of Japanese games in favor of digitized images and photos of real people.
