WaterStone Productions

Title: Dark Tales From The Lost Soul
Platform: Playstation 1
Link: http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/psx/home/576169.html

This was one of those ultra-obscure games that only got a Japanese release, but thanks to my wonderful hacked PS1, I was actually able to play it on my home system.  Overall, while it's a bit weird and dated in terms of it's graphics, it was actually quite a good game (at least I thought).

The basic gist of it is that there's this nightclub with all this weird stuff going around.  You have this really creepy announcer guy that is going from table to table, where there are various persons that have something to do with each story (or are there simply to add to the odd ambience of the room).  I remember one of them had to do with baseballs and the announcer brought up some weird connection.  Keep in mind, the entire game is in Japanese, and unless you know someone who can translate, speak it yourself, or can find a guide somewhere, you're not going to know what they are talking about.  But it was kind of a mixture between the Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt.  Essentially, there are three storylines in the game, and you can pick any of them you want.  They're completely unrelated except for the announcer guy walking around the club.

The first story is about a cop who is chasing a serial killer clown around an amusement park.  Your job is to take him down somehow without getting killed yourself.  You have a gun and 6 bullets, that's it.  The different thing than what people might expect is that you never see yourself, only the item you're holding, and you can hear yourself cursing at the killer and such.  Similarly, you can't see the whole killer, just his mask floating around.  There are deathtraps all over the place, and lots of puzzles to solve in order to progress.  It's doable even if you don't understand much Japanese, since most of it involves puzzle solving and timing.  There are also (I think) different endings you can get.  This was my favorite story of the bunch, and I had a lot of fun trying to bring that psycho clown down.  Die Psycho Clown die!  Hehe.

The second story was basically about a couple of tourists or something that were visiting some restaurant in some desert area, maybe like Arizona or something.  They find most places deserted, except for one particular person you never see who keeps on trying to kill both of them.  Lots of time you're just trying to get from place to place, avoiding getting pushed off the side of the road or getting killed.  It's been a while since I played this (and my disc is somewhere around here...) but eventually you do manage to get him back and survive.  Not the best story (a little frustrating sometimes with the driving sequences), but overall not too bad.

Finally, there's a game about a writer that is trying to finish a book.  The game is called Ghost Writer (I think), and it's the most text intensive game, so I had trouble understanding what he was saying.  I think basically he had a deadline for his book or something and was running out of time with his publisher.  So in his dreams, all this weird and crazy stuff happens in order for him to get "inspiration".  One example is fishing for a book in one of those crane games that you put quarters into.  I can't recall how the game ended, but it wasn't the best in the lot.  I'm sure if I understood Japanese I'd probably have liked the game more.  Oh well.

In the end, this is one of those rare horror gems that most people will never ever see from Japan.  There are at least a dozen on my list that seem to be Japanese only, such as R?MJ The Mystery Hospital, that I'm going to be importing somehow to get a chance to play them.  This one is pretty good I would say. The graphics are a bit dated, but I never worried about that as long as the gameplay is good, and this one is pretty nice.  Just make sure you have some way of understanding what is being said if you fully want to enjoy the game.  If you ever get a chance to play this game, try it out.  You might like it.