Other Side Of Mist And Mountain

My first honest reaction sitting down with Other Side of Mist and Mountain was cautious optimism: a side-scrolling visual novel built around the Kisaragi Station urban legend, mixing detective work, escape-room puzzles, exploration, and light stealth, all wrapped in a genuinely attractive art style. The background art during dialogue segments is detailed and atmospheric, and the soundtrack does real work establishing dread. On paper, this is exactly the kind of low-budget indie that punches above its weight. In practice, the gap between premise and execution is wide enough to drive a ghost train through. The core loop asks you to explore locations as Shizuno Yokoyama, a man who has turned grief into a detective agency and spends five years chasing the thread of his missing girlfriend Maha's disappearance at the phantom Kisaragi station. Cases arrive as a series of seemingly disconnected supernatural mysteries that eventually pull toward that central vanishing. Structurally, that is a solid chassis. The puzzle design has moments of genuine craft: interactive elements are mostly readable, the better escape-room sequences reward observation over random clicking, and a handful of head-scratchers land with real satisfaction when solved. For a roughly 10-hour experience with multiple endings and choices that carry weight, there is a reasonable amount of content for the asking price. The problem is consistency, and it compounds across every layer of the game. Puzzle quality swings violently, with well-constructed mystery rooms sitting beside late-game sequences that feel like padding: conveniently placed items, arbitrary obstacles, and chase sections with clunky movement that undermine the tension they are meant to create. The animated elements work against the static art rather than with it. Character breathing animations during every dialogue beat become distracting fast, and horror moments lean on cut-to-black jump scares with monsters that register more as awkward than frightening. The biggest obstacle, though, is the English script. Whether it started in another language and was machine-translated or was written in English from the start, the result is text that fights comprehension at every turn. Character names change across the same playthrough depending on whether you are reading dialogue, an achievement popup, or a story beat. A recurring figure meant to frighten is repeatedly described in ways that undercut the intended tone completely, landing as unintentional comedy. For a narrative-driven game where reading is the primary activity, a broken script is not a cosmetic flaw. It is a structural failure. Community sentiment on Steam sits at a Mixed rating, roughly 60 percent positive, which tracks: the people recommending it tend to be genre fans forgiving enough to read past the rough localization, while detractors find the whole package incoherent. If you are a dedicated fan of Japanese urban legend fiction, occult mystery visual novels, or the Kisaragi Station creepypasta specifically, there is enough atmospheric groundwork here to extract some value. Go in knowing the text will require patience and occasional creative interpretation on your part. Everyone else will find the frustration outpaces the intrigue before the credits roll. Diego, Scout Team

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