Livestream: Escape from Hotel Izanami

I went in expecting a lightweight anime horror novelty and came out genuinely impressed by how much dread qureate squeezes out of a side-scrolling hotel corridor. The setup is simple: three content-creator friends, Mio, Nana, and Azusa, arrive at the derelict Hotel Izanami to film a spooky video, and things fall apart almost immediately when a hatchet-wielding pig mascot starts hunting them through the halls. What follows is a game that punches above its budget on atmosphere. Gameplay splits across three distinct beats. The exploration layer has you combing rooms with a phone flashlight, angling the beam at specific spots to surface collectible items and memo clues. There is no objective marker and no player pin on the map, so you are genuinely memorizing floor layouts and using found documents to work out puzzle solutions. Puzzles stay logical, one item at a time, though some examination spots require precise flashlight angles that can get fiddly. The second beat is the Piggy Mascot chase: when the mascot appears, one hatchet hit means instant death and a reload, so you run and duck into toilets or behind corridor pillars, pressing up or down to conceal yourself. The hiding mechanic is forgiving enough that panic is usually brief, but the threat lingers because the mascot can appear without warning. The third layer is visual novel-style phone calls between the three protagonists, with Live2D character portraits whose expressions and text-shake effects do a lot of heavy emotional lifting. What works genuinely well is the sound design philosophy. The game leans into quiet, letting shuffling footsteps and labored breathing carry the tension instead of a constant horror soundtrack. Background objects clatter on their own, electronics flicker, and the phone-camera framing of the visual novel scenes borrows found-footage tricks that feel natural rather than cheap because the livestream premise earns them. The overall vibe draws comparison to early Clock Tower and Corpse Party, though with less graphic violence and a lighter tone overall. Multiple endings tied to key item choices give completionists a reason to replay, and a first run clocks in around three to four hours, with full completion closer to seven to nine. The weaknesses are honest ones. The fan-service ecchi scenes are brief CG unlocks that feel bolted on rather than integrated, and critics and players alike note they add little to the horror mood. Switching between the three playable characters provides variety in voice and appearance but changes almost nothing mechanically. The translation has occasional misspellings, and navigating exterior staircases requires pressing two directional inputs simultaneously in a way that disrupts flow. There is no dialogue backlog, which stings when you miss a clue buried in a phone call. Steam user reception sits at roughly 78 percent positive across several hundred reviews, which is a fair read: people who went in with calibrated expectations came out satisfied. If you can tolerate a short runtime, mild pixel-precision frustrations when searching tight spots, and a horror premise that stops just short of fully committing, there is a genuinely tense and oddly touching small-studio horror game here. Newcomers to the hide-and-seek horror subgenre will likely find it a confident entry point. Veterans of the genre will spot the ceiling quickly but probably still finish it in a sitting.

Alex · Scout Team

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