Kuon

Instead of a shotgun and a handful of shells, you get paper talismans and the patience to draw the right one. Set during the Heian period, FromSoftware's 2004 horror piece takes its cues not from Romero but from noh theatre and kaidan folklore, where the dead are grievances with faces. The enemies are not shambling infected. They are women who were wronged, and the game rarely lets you forget it.

Two scenarios open the game. The Yin path follows Utsuki, searching a rotting estate for her missing sister; the Yang path follows Sakuya, a young exorcist sent in with rather more competence and rather less innocence. Finishing both unlocks a third, which is where the story actually resolves. That structure was not unusual for the era, but it works here because the two perspectives disagree about what is happening in the mansion, and the disagreement is the point.

Combat is the sticking point. You bind spells to a card system and cast them in real time while the fixed cameras swing around you, and the result is stiff in a way that even 2004 noticed. Encounters are best avoided where possible, which is at least consistent with the fiction. What the engine does well is atmosphere: corridors lit by paper lanterns, tatami rooms that stretch too far, insects and long black hair used with a restraint that Japanese horror cinema had already made famous and most games were copying badly.

Agetec brought it West in small numbers and it vanished almost immediately, which is why the disc now carries a price that has nothing to do with its quality. It arrived at the tail end of the survival horror boom, after Silent Hill 3 and Fatal Frame II had raised the bar on mood, and it does not match either for craft. But it has something neither of them has, which is a specific historical texture, a court-era Japan of omens and ritual purity where the supernatural is a matter of civil administration gone wrong.

Play it for the setting and the sound design, and make peace with the fighting early. FromSoftware spent the sixth generation making strange, unglamorous games for narrow audiences, and this is one of the strangest. The mansion stays with you longer than anything you do inside it.