Horror games and dating simulations are something many people got into over the covid years. So what if these two genres were combined to make one game? Your final product would look something like Homicipher.
Homicipher is a game that mixes the struggle of decoding languages you don’t understand with trying to escape anomalies attempting to kill you, all bundled into a dating simulator. Throughout the game, you are supposed to figure out what the characters are trying to say through your own interpretation. To make this easier, the translated words stay in a dictionary in order to keep their speech transcribed into your own language.
We are able to figure out the story throughout the game based on what options you decide to choose. For instance, depending on certain choices picked, our body changes and our memories start to resurface. As a result of this, we start to learn of our own backstory and who we are or who we are implied to be.
The characters themselves are interesting with their own quirks and characteristics, despite the lack of depth in their own backstories and knowledge of how they ended up in the boundary. For example, one of the first people we meet is Mr. Chopped. A piece of information we never obtain is how he has ended up in the boundary or if he was a human before like our own character.
In case dating video games aren’t your thing, Homicipher allows you to avoid these kinds of interactions; a vast majority of interactions with the characters don’t have to be based in romance. Most of the romance within the game is implied rather than outright said, depending on what path you decide to follow. The route known to have more romantic interactions would be Mr. Crawling’s. This is because of his mannerisms and preference of constantly following us around in the world.
Homicipher also paints an accurate depiction of trying to understand a language that isn’t your own. Throughout the game, from the moment we enter, the only thoughts we are able to actually understand and decipher are our own. As we go through the story, we learn new words and terms to add to the dictionary based on the interpretations that are made with context of the situations and previous words that have been learned.
Overall, in my own personal experience and opinion, I believe the game is worth the money, and it is an experience that you won’t get with most game genres, such as Otome or other games.
