Yûrei Station

A young Japanese girl starts receiving strange messages on her phone, and she finally lets them guide her onto an empty train just before dawn, a train that shouldn’t exist. There is no telling where it will lead her, or what she and the player will learn once they reach their destination.

Yûrei Station is a short adventure game that draws inspiration from Japanese ghost stories, with a somewhat unsettling narrative and hand-painted graphics created entirely with pencils and watercolors by high school students.

The gameplay is fairly straightforward, as you will mostly have to click certain objects or bring up your phone whenever a new message is received. You can also read past messages if you believe that you’ve missed something.

There are also a few puzzles to solve along the way, and they are not too complex. Hints you receive in messages offer assistance, but make sure you look at the actual text on your phone screen, not just the translation.

Nothing about the events is presented clearly, so you will have to put together bits and pieces to figure out what is actually going on. Even so, much of the story is open to interpretation.

While the creepy atmosphere might make your hair stand on end, this isn’t a horror game in the classical sense, as there are no terrifying moments or jump scares to worry about. The truly scary part is figuring out what actually happened, and is happening, to the young girl and her boyfriend.

Yûrei Station is very short – it should only take you about 15 minutes to complete it. It is, however, a true work of art, and you can’t help but appreciate the amount of work that went into producing it.

The graphics were created using pencils and watercolors, in only a couple of days, by 25 students from a French graphic art school. To see their drawings brought to life is truly amazing, and they certainly give the game a unique feel.

In a nutshell, Yûrei Station is an original, hand-crafted adventure game that looks like a work of art and manages to tell a great story. Some might find it a bit confusing, and it is quite short, but it certainly worth checking out.