Ever since Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro’s Silent Hills project was unceremoniously scuppered — an event that unbelievably happened 7 years ago now — there have been a lot of imitators trying to fill the void that it left behind.
More specifically, there have been countless attempts at replicating the nightmarish atmosphere and illogical feel of the game’s bite-sized appetizer, P.T, with the worst examples of this ripping it off wholesale.
If you peruse the horror tag on Steam, it won’t take long before you stumble across a first-person title of some kind that has you looping around a (typically domestic) environment, with aspects of the geography changing with each pass through.
To be fair, it was a really effective premise the first few times we saw it, but it has become so familiar that any trace of that original appeal has long since worn off. If an aspiring horror developer wants to grab your attention nowadays, they’re going to have to do more than just rehash the same tired, old formula.
This brings us to No Return (无归). A new offering from BlameTech (a six-person development team consisting of industry veterans who’ve worked together at companies like Tencent and NetEase), this upcoming game still features the inescapable hallway gimmick that we’ve all grown accustomed to. However, it will be putting a fresh, distinctly Chinese spin on it.
The unique selling point of No Return is that it is steeped in Asian folklore, in a way that distinguishes it from the other titles that have followed in P.T’s footsteps. Much like Home Sweet Home (which heavily leaned on aspects of Thai and Indonesian mythology), the game’s country of origin is an integral part of its DNA.
Puzzles will require you to perform certain rituals (one particularly grizzly instance has you draining a pig carcass of blood in order to appease a spirit), flavor text will offer insights into the Chinese interpretation of the afterlife, and you will be haunted by specters that are totally unlike those you encounter in western releases.
BlameTech has also tried to provide a little more interactivity than you might expect from your garden variety “walking sim”. There are pseudo-mini games and clever ways of getting you to interact with the world, beyond just holding down the “W” key to move forward. For instance, there’s one part where you have to navigate a cursed labyrinth from a top-down perspective, all while carefully avoiding collision with any objects, lest you be teleported right back to the beginning of the maze.
As for the narrative, No Return does seem to be taking cues from P.T. here as well. After all, you’ll be playing as a father/husband trapped in a purgatory-like world, who is forced to confront some terrible demons from his past. Yet hopefully the distinct focus on Chinese folklore should give this its own identity.
The official description reads: “No Return tells a story of a broken home. As one recollects memory fragments, not all memories are welcoming. Just like tearing a band-aid repeatedly on an open wound, you cannot avert your eyes from this cruel and painful experience.”
That synopsis might not be too revealing, but the semantics of words like “cruel”, “painful” and “wound” do at least give you an idea of the tone they’re going for. No Return will be coming to Steam in Fall 2022, and you can add it to your Wishlist now.
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