The thing about horror is that in order to work properly, it requires something which can be rather delicate – a fear of unknown. That is present even in the otherwise dumb slasher movies – if they succeed at actually being scary, it’s because you don’t know when the (remaining) characters will be attacked, and you don’t know who, if anyone, will ultimately survive. When this is translated into games in the form of action/survival horror, the fear is entwined with the stress of item management: whenever you choose whether to heal now or later, to shoot now or later, you don’t know how many enemies and other obstacles will still waiting for you later on, and so you can’t gain control over the situation through planning – merely make an educated guess and stress out when it goes wrong. In the psychological horror, the fear is more about realising that something is truly wrong, yet also not understanding why that is, and fearing what might happen to you, or to your protagonist, if you do learn the reason why. While SIN has more opportunities to die “normally” then some other genre entries on here, like Subject or Immortal, it still clearly aims for the latter type of horror, but fails outright regardless.

Storyline



The game starts with the protagonist, named Elm, waking up in an empty, desolate area with a severe case of amnesia. There's nothing of note besides a gravestone with some dates on it but no readable name. Once he finds it, he's approached by a man named Oak, who claims to possess all his memories, and will give them back in exchange for collecting mystic fragments across the five areas of the world they're in. Elm agrees…and then the game decides to basically cut to him sitting in the train used to travel between these areas through the void, narrating to us that he’s already completed two areas without our involvement. He also suddenly introduces two characters whose presence wasn’t even hinted at before with a casual line of dialogue, as if they (Phlox and Azalea) were always there. Their presence feels out-of-context, and we never learn ANYTHING about them, besides that Azalea can sometimes sorta worry about you, while Phlox is the cheerful one and regularly drops dumb comments like the one in the image above.

This weird decision is hard to explain as anything but the lack of development time, and it cripples narrative cohesion from the get-go. We are essentially encouraged to treat the areas we do go through as places that can be mocked and easily disregarded, which is a kind of a problem when the game still attempts using the regular sort of scares, whose effectiveness largely hinges on the player taking things seriously. The creator probably intended for Phlox’s cheerfulness and such to come off as disturbing, but this required more subtlety, more doubt and second-guessing about his motives. SIN cannot pull any of that off: it is the kind of game where you walk into the third area of the world (and the first area of the actual game, the aforementioned abandoned house) and the protagonist immediately says he smells fire and smoke. Azalea later says she can perceive fire and smoke as well due to her keen senses, and yet they’re both still surprised when the place burns down after they complete it.

In fact, all the characters are more surprised by this then by the things normal people might be more concerned about – like, you know, the ghosts of the obviously murdered children. The protagonist accepts their presence and their creepy requests as a given, he elicits no reaction to the (reasonably touching) parents’ notes and diaries, and neither he nor his two companions (plus Oak, who always stays with the train) bother to comment when giant hands emerge and try to kill him, for instance, or when ghostly eyes and blood appear from behind a mirror. Now, refer back to the opening, throw in the fact that Oak seems much less concerned about getting the fragments from those worlds then he is about Elm’s willingness to go with it, and you can probably put together what has happened already. Really, at this point, the game title itself is basically a spoiler. Hence, nothing in the following two areas surprises anymore. Well, nothing besides the way the third area progressively spoils the ending outright, yet the protagonist still seems to be shocked by the "revelation".

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)




This neat visual trick is pretty much the only real distinction SIN has over its countless rivals in the rmk scene. Essentially, it replaces searching for keys in order to open locked doors (though that still happens once or twice), with finding the aforementioned variously-coloured fragments; each of them will restore a corresponding room to a playable state by filling in the missing squares. It looks impressive enough, and the mapping itself is usually fine. There are some light effects, with Elm typically having a large circle of light around him while the rest of the room is somewhat darker, but not dark enough to be actually invisible without light (like shadows in Cardiophobia), so it’s not that important. You also have some decent sprite edits that aim to make things creepier, like teddy bears with tops of their heads cut off placed alongside the normal ones, or the amusement park images like this:



Which again, you’re unlikely to care about much by this point. Yes, it looks creepy. The protagonist doesn’t care, his companions don’t either, and since you probably know why it’s like this, neither should you. The busts for the characters would be fine in a typical anime-style game, but here, they’re rather distractingly bright and immaculately clean. The music and sounds are more on the generic horror side. There was a nice effect in the house where you get a spoken line from the girl ghost (“Come and play” in ethereal Japanese voice, apparently), but that’s about it.

Gameplay


Somehow, a lot of empty chests build up more tension then anything else the game has.

You need to collect the fragments required to restore all the “mosaic” rooms. This is usually done through solving a puzzle of some kind. Sometimes it’s a number puzzle, where you need to enter a right number, and getting it wrong won’t kill you. Sometimes it’s more like a riddle, where a mistake will provide a sorta-creepy, sorta-silly death of some kind. None of them are truly difficult: the “Sunrise-Sunset” puzzle in the last area did require some less-conventional thinking, but that’s about it. The next lockbox puzzle actually punished me for overthinking: I assumed the clue lay with the volume numbers of some medical volumes scattered around that room, but it just required me to reverse a code found in the mirror earlier.

Sometimes, the fragments are also found simply laying on the floor on their own. However, picking these up will invariably trigger a giant hand chasing after you. It surprises the first time, especially since you can stumble into this before you get the first chance to save, and will thus be required to sit through the entire intro with its subpar writing again. The subsequent appearances of the exact same hand quickly go tiresome, however. For instance, you’ll soon learn to simply approach the loose-lying fragments with Elm already turned towards the exit, making the escape foolproof. Even when their appearances are less predictable, it’s simply hard to get scared by them, when they only appear once in that particular room, not following you into the outside map, and not reappearing once you re-enter said room. The fact that you can always reliably save in the hallways, etc. where your two companions are standing, and thus know they’re always safe places where nothing will happen, further eliminates the remnants of tension. The game feels even more like a controlled haunted house then it already was: some obviously trap interactions (like failing the riddles or sticking your hand into a hole in the wall for no reason, to get half your body torn off) actually become fun to trigger when you’ve already saved beforehand and know you won’t be losing any progress over it.

Conclusion


This menu screen is kinda nice, though.

So, this is SIN. A game whose existence clearly demonstrates that all the outward trappings of horror are worth practically nothing when they’re not accompanied by an actual mystery at its core. To be fair, there’s supposed to be a secret ending, too, which might make things a tiny bit more interesting, but I’m certainly nowhere near invested enough in the game to do so.