Among the more interesting bits in this week’s issue of Famitsu magazine in Japan is a spread on Nazowaku-kan, an original adventure game from Capcom and the publisher’s first shot at producing something along the lines of Ace Attorney and Ghost Trick on the Nintendo 3DS.
Judging by the first look at the game Famitsu offered, Nazowaku-kan looks quite similar to classic first-person mystery games like The 7th Guest or Kenji Eno’s D, albeit with more of a fantasy bent. There’s a good reason for that: Thhe character designs are being handled by Tadahiro Uesugi, an illustrator and animator who did a lot of the concept artwork for the film version of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. The game’s director is Minoru Nakai, who’s mostly worked on Resident Evil titles up to now, and the story’s by Yukinori Kitajima, who also wrote Okamiden for Capcom.
The game itself is an adventure with a standard theme: explore a spooky mansion filled with odd characters and odder traps. What makes it innovative is how the gameplay takes advantage of nearly every bullet point in the 3DS’ feature set. Nazowaku-kan hardly ever uses the console’s buttons; instead, you’ll tilt the 3DS to scope out your surroundings, touch the screen to point out items to examine, and even use the mike to speak directly with your surrogate character within the game. (That latter feature may remind some of Lifeline, a voice-controlled PlayStation 2 adventure that had a neat concept but fell flat in the execution.)
