The End: Inari's Quest

I wanted this one to work. There is something genuinely appealing about a one-person Unreal Engine project built around Asian mythology, a neon-soaked dystopia, and a fox carrying a cub through streets ruled by hostile machines. The premise pulls from a real place of feeling, and the cyberpunk city, at least when the camera is still, carries quiet beauty. Neon light bounces off corridors and subways in ways that suggest a developer who cared about mood. The sound design does its part too, adding texture to an atmosphere that, in screenshots, looks like it could stand next to something much more polished. The reality of playing it is something else. Controls are the first casualty. Moving your fox across streets and around irradiated rats, drones, and cyborgs requires a precision the input system refuses to provide. The stealth verbs, playing dead to fool enemies, sleeping to recover health, knocking down cyborgs by sprinting into their legs, read well on paper. In practice they are awkward enough to pull you out of every quiet moment the game tries to build. The fox model itself is lovely in static frames, but movement breaks the illusion: animations clip, the cub you are escorting resizes itself when picked up, and collision detection is loose enough that running into walls can launch you through fences entirely. The structure is episodic, with the first and only released episode clocking in somewhere around 45 minutes to an hour. The first half tasks you with protecting the cub across city environments, managing a small lives system. The second half drops the cub from the narrative without ceremony, swaps the lives system for a checkpoint system, and asks you to wander a park looking for three buttons to press. There is no save feature across sessions. The episode ends before any of its mythological setup, the goddess Inari, the search for the last humans, pays anything off. Community reception on Steam sits firmly in mostly negative territory, and the criticisms are consistent: the game is too short, the controls fight you, crashes and optimization problems surface regularly, and puzzles that could have been charming are under-explained. The developer did engage with feedback post-launch, posting notes on key remapping for non-QWERTY keyboards, which speaks to a genuine effort. But effort and outcome are two different things, and what shipped is an incomplete foundation rather than a finished experience. If you are drawn to the fox-in-a-city concept and the cyberpunk-meets-Japanese-mythology aesthetic, the screenshots are honest. The mood is real. But as something to actually play through, The End: Inari's Quest asks for patience it does not repay. Stray arrived later and delivered a version of this fantasy that actually holds together. This one is for completionists of the subgenre only.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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