HELL AND BACK
In TREK TO YOMI, the dog is more bark than bite
By George Yang
Trek to Yomi copies the style of Akira Kurosawa’s iconic black and white samurai films: rice fields blowing in the wind, villages burning, a great black swirling vortex in hell. OK, so Trek to Yomi goes to some places Kurosawa’s films didn’t. But the path there is littered with glitches, and I only stuck it out through the finicky, floaty combat to see where my samurai’s descent into madness would lead him.
The game’s revenge tale is standard samurai stuff, but the story is well-told. As protagonist Hiroki faces his personal demons (also, literal demons) I got to make decisions that influenced exactly how this samurai tragedy would end. All of the Japanese voice actors give raw performances, and Hiroki’s actor in particular sells his downward spiral into anger and regret.