[Ecchi]Livestream: Escape from Izanami Hotel

The second not VN from qureate, a Vn group that brought Ninnin Days, Trouble Days, and most recently Harem Tavern. This is very different then those. This is a horror themed game, with I guess some ecchi elements. Like Prison Princess, this is mostly concerned with some puzzle solving and having the right item from pixel hunting.

Before I get any further, horror and ecchi really don’t fit. Porn can work, ecchi just does not. What little ecchi this has makes me question even calling it an ecchi game, but it does have a “all girls 18+” disclaimer.

The story is that Nana, a streamer who wants to hit some real numbers, decides to drag two of her friends a local haunted building to shoot a stream. They enter the cursed building and they get separated in about 5 minutes. Mio, basically the main heroine is left behind on the first floor. She sees this creepy pig mascot costume with blood stains on it and decides to go catch up with her friends. Some light haunting happens and the third friend calls Mio, freaking out because she’s bad with horror and has been left alone on the second floor. Moving toward the stairs, the pig mascot with a cleaver shows up behind Mio, and the main game starts. From here the goal is to reunite the group and escape the hotel, in a way that everyone survives to the next day as a part of the curse kills those who visit this place at all.

It’s a mix of Five Nights and standard ghost haunting stuff I saw a lot of when I used to watch and read Japanese horror at all.

Gameplay is a mix of escape room puzzles, hiding from the mascot, and fetch quests. Most of your time will be spent pixel hunting for the items you need, as your cursor in this attempt at a point and click is the light of your cell phone, which is not exactly accurate. It doesn’t help that often, items you will need can’t be picked up until just before you need them meaning you walk past things you will need and not even register them as items you might want to pay attention to.

The escape room-ish puzzles are mostly attach item to thing and a few actual puzzles and not much else. They are clearly not the focus of the game and really feel like they exist more for CGs then gameplay. As for the mascot? Anytime he decides to show up you run behind a pillar or into the last room that let you into the toilet, enter it and he goes away. He will enter the room before you hide, but as long as you enter the hiding place he gives up. Not exactly a difficult hunter to avoid, which gives the game a complete lack of actual threat.

The last notable thing I want to point out is you walk really slow, probably a result of needing the game to take longer, the girls being in a dark building with only cell phone light, and to annoy people. This makes the required going back to grab things very tedious, and to get the good ending you are required to go through the entire building twice without the only actual threat in the game being around, so its just a boring search for items you don’t even know about.

I’m going to list ending requirements next, just so that they are written down. They will be as unspoilery as possible-

1- When on emergency exit for first time, do not get the hat. It disappears if you leave this screen at all, locking you into ending one.

2- When in office, check the left side for a bunch of key machines. Grab the wire out of these, locking you into ending 2.

3- After solving the music box, leave the hotel.

4&5- After ending 3, attempt to go back into hotel for cutscene(might need to walk into front hall then leave). Check vending machine. Get tape from third floor. Go back to machine for invisible maze puzzle. Go to music box room for key. Follow plot until asked to mark wall. Mark with red crayon for ending 4, glow in the dark paint for 5.

As for what ecchi content this has… Not much. Like I said at the start, ecchi and horror don’t work very well together. You can make it work, with their clothes getting worn down and delusions and such, but death traps and murder? Ghost kids and pig mascot? Not erotic. Prison princess worked a bit better because their was no sense of danger and the traps came across as silly more then dangerous, plus the outfits the girls wore wear sensible anime princess outfits that showed just enough to be sexual. Here all three girls are wearing modern day college fashion kinds of clothes and outside of one cg, they never wear anything else. Two of the girls do have cleavage, but its in amounts you can see in normal life and only two cgs ever focus on them without death or horror expressions on their faces, which while a few people might like I certainly don’t need to see that when looking for eye candy.

Anyway, the total ecchi in this is I think 4 panty shot cgs, a wet shirt scene that doesn’t work in the gallery for some reason(you can’t do the minigames in the gallery, so you only get the base minigame cgs with the ability to make them react to touching), and the one ending of Mio in front of a mirror naked with some cleavage before bad end. You do get some panty shots when they hide I guess, but again terror and panty shots are not erotic to me.

For a 4-5 hour game it’s fine, though definitely more of an on sale purchase then 20$. I do think Prison Princess is better, hands down, but there are not a lot of ecchi escape room style games so if you like that, this is one of the few. I wish there was any kind of sprint, even a limited one, so the constant hallways with nothing in them went by faster, and that a few more of the puzzles weren’t just find item that you couldn’t get before. It’s not a very well built game. It’s so weird how this company was making Harem Tavern and this at the same time, and if you compare character design and content this just is not comparable. I get that the ecchi can’t be everything to the game(though there is nudity in Switch games…), but maybe focus on that a bit more if that is all you have going for you?

PC save for Livestream: Escape from Hotel Izanami

Has all cgs and endings unlocked, with 4 saves that are right next to said endings. I hope, the files for the save don’t really fit that, so I hope that the actual saves aren’t somewhere else and I have no idea where that would be.

Gameplay: 3/10 Eroticness: 2/10 Story: 5/10

Completion: What it took-

You can get all 5 endings in one save if you know what you are doing. I didn’t, so it took 1.5 runs. Get all five endings gets you all but one cg, which you get by watching the tv in the tripod room. The only tv that works in the game.