NextDoor is a creepy 2D horror game inspired by the works of Junji Ito, about a young woman with some very troublesome neighbors.
In NextDoor you take on the role of a young woman who lives alone in an apartment block. She’s trying to study but the neighbor upstairs is blasting the music at full volume and disturbing her. When she goes to complain she stumbles across another neighbor who is even more disturbing though!
Taking around 10 minutes to play through, it’s a well crafted little horror game that does a good job of weaving its dark tale. It could do with having a little more difference between the endings (getting caught or not getting caught), but other than that it’s very impressive. The pixel art animation is excellent, there are some fun twists and the monster design is particularly unsettling. It turns out there are worse things than neighbors who play their music too loud!
Controls: Arrow Keys – Movement, Spacebar – Interact
Available On: Windows
Gameplay Video: Here
Download or Play NextDoor Here
As a huge Junji Ito junky I immediatly clicked on your video for this gem. The dev of this game really knocked it out of the park with this one. Just like Ito’s stories this is short but utterly chilling with an ending that leaves you with far more to ponder and reflect upon than most artists are comfertable leaving their audience with which says a lot about how this dev views his/her/their audience and the confidence they have in their own art.
Ito respects his audiences time and we see this reflected in this video game as well. There isn’t a bunch of fetch questing or needless keys to find to open doors to nowhere simply to pad out time. No unessisary and dragging exposition dumps nor any dull narrative I would feel compelled to skip. We are given the steak alacart and it’s exactly what i would expect from a true Ito fan.
The thing about capuring Ito’s brilliance for another media(besides the fact everyone always fails miserably at it lol) is that you wouldn’t want to rip off one of his iconic monster designs. So you would have to find a way to effortlessly take the themes and emotional responses that his art envokes (both narratively and especially visually) from that work while utilizing your own “monster” design in order to weave an original yet impactful recreation of the feeling and experience of reading a junji ito manga which so countless many many people have utterly failed to do (with budgets,staff, and time constraints several orders over any indie dev). While obviously this is no 60$ full feature game, i think that is the aproach that trapped so many in the past.
Thus i believe that the dev of this game has accomplished this task flawlessly!
Honestly i am pretty surprised at just how well this person captured every aspect of Ito’s work yet did so respefully and in a completely original and transformitive way. From what i can tell this draws heavily from “Neighbor’s window” and “Town without streets”. The creator of this game certainly knew his/her Ito and even better they truly respected the mans genius and it shows in every frame of this game.
Bravo, encore! I wish there was more but I am glad it wasnt overstuffed filler who used contrived narratives to stretch the game out further than it’s milage was actually worth.
I really would love to follow the devs future projects, his/her/their competence truly moved me and I have never posted here before. Is there some sort of link to their own page or way to follow this person? I have to imagine that whoever made this will soon be pumping out more mainstream bangers and I want to be the first to wishlist that shyt! So I can say “pft yea I was playing their esoteric and experimental stuff *long* before noclip’s recent documentry on them”
hah.
10/10 ito banger would, heck will play again!