Yay! Another horror title.

So as I said. I decided to play another title by Zigzag (and of course translated by Deja Vu). I had been curious as to whether I was going to get scared by a visual novels again (early chapters of Umineko were scary, now it’s just awesome).

As you may remember Saya no Uta scared the bejazus out of me. This title does the same, but in different way.

J-Horror, to me, is almost always more creepy than Western Horror. J-Horror doesn’t require scary monsters, or supernatural elements to be scary. Usually in J-Horror, you have an urban setting, a killer you don’t directly see most of the time, and normal places that look more horrifying than they should.

Style of Writing

The Noose is a narrative visual novel. Dealing with an unnamed female protagonist and a particularly scary house.

The narrative is the strongest point of the visual novel, leaving the main character unnamed was a good choice, as it sort of puts you in the role of the protagonist.

The protagonist is female, but ultimately that has no real bearing on whether you are able to connect with her situation or not (cept I can’t figure out why she didn’t hide under the bed during any of the more scary sequences).

Art and Design

The Noose shows off a particular thing I like about amateur visual novels. They can little to no drawn art but still give a very powerful experience with writing and music.

The backgrounds as you can see, use the real-life photo + filter approach that many Nscripter VNs use (Tsukihime and Umineko being key examples). It only adds to the atmosphere.

Music and Sound

I counted three tracks of music, which makes sense cause it’s a short game. They all managed to convey the proper mood.

Getting it

The game is free though the creator of the translated version has requested that people do not distribute the game anymore, as he wants to release a refined translation. But it’s not that hard to find with a couple google searches (“the noose.exe”).

I strongly recommend this to anyone who likes horror, or is at least intrigued by the concept of a short scary visual novel.