JU-ON: The Grudge

Based on the classic Japanese horror movie, JU-ON: The Grudge is a ‘haunted house simulator’ - or 'fright sim'!

Takashi Shimizu, creator of the original movie, is heavily involved in the development of the game.

Using the Wii Remote as a flashlight, JU-ON: The Grudge has players move forward with the touch of a button and explore haunted areas such as an abandoned warehouse, a dimly lit hospital and a mannequin factory.

Features

With a story comprised of five levels revolving around the unfortunate Yamada family, JU-ON: The Grudge features a new unique gameplay mechanic that measures your movements during play: the more you flinch and jump, the worse your score.

The player can progress through the game with bad scores, but it is those with a steady hand and nerves of steel who will win the day.

User reviews

The scares are really very very good, occassionaly very inventive and what you might expect from a master of J-horror. Unfortunately they're identical every play through, so only really scary the first time. And because the game is so linear and scripted, it hurts the effectiveness of the scares somewhat. It's a bit too "one after the other".

The controls are really nicely simple and effective. The characters walk painfuly slow though.

No discernable story. Doesn't really tie into the already diluted Ju-On universe in any way beside the ghost characters. The, shall we say, 'misguided' box-art compounds this. Won't look good next to your Ju-On DVD.

Graphics are really quite nice, if a bit glitchy and very dark. It can be certainly taken seriously graphics-wise, though sometimes it's just TOO dark, and geometry has an occassional habbit of dissappearing. The locations are really cool though, very Japanese and diverse and scary.

Audio is passable. Could be a lot better.

Because of the way it's so linear and scripted, there's little in the way of replayability. There's an odd (sort of) two player mode to try, and there's some hidden items to collect in each level, but that's about it. The collecting items is something I intend to explore further, so that is at least a little compelling.

In conclusion I really have to mention how short this game is. There's four chapters, and each one is about 15 minutes long. If the characters walked faster than one mile an hour, the whole game would be over in less time than it took to queue for it. Horror fans, and Ju-On fans should still consider it (or renting if possible) as it does have a couple of good scares and it's interesting to play. However I can't help but think it was wrapped up early, cutting out at least half of what they might have planned, and it has an odd mix of really good things and really not good things.

Rik