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The terror of playing a Japanese horror video game with cute face filters

Dale Roll Jan 17, 2019
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It turns out that making freaky ghosts wear Snapchat-style filters does not make them less scary.

There’s a Japanese free-to-play computer game called Kyoufu no Mori (which means “Fear Forest”) and well, it’s exactly what you’d think. You, the player, walk around a dark forest at night, in first-person view, mind you, until you stumble upon ghosts. Some will chase you, and some won’t, but which ones will and which ones won’t are for you to find out in multiple terrifying rounds of trial and error.

Now, if you aren’t a fan of running into creepy ghosts in a dark forest, even if it’s virtual, Japanese video game vlogger Masa thought there might be a way for you to get through the game without wetting your pants: by adding some Snow filters to the ghosts’ faces. Snow is a popular camera app that has filters that can add cute makeup, animal ears, anime character outfits, and other fun things to the people in the shot, like the photo below.

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A post shared by 🌐YUTABON / YUN YUFFY🇯🇵🇰🇷🇦🇪 (@yutabon_yuffy_dolce)

The app has become so popular among Japanese young people that a new word was invented to describe the act of using it. There are tons and tons of filters to use, too, so Masa’s idea was that, if he put some of the filters on the ghosts, they wouldn’t be so scary. Maybe they would even be cute, right?

But he was wrong. So very wrong. Masa’s video reveals that even turning a floating, disembodied, grinning face into the lovable talking Pokémon Meowth does not make it any less creepy.

The mechanism was pretty good at picking up the virtual faces, so Masa tried it with several of the ghosts that appear in the game, but he had the most success with the terrifying floating face that is found in the middle of the forest, so he experimented with applying various filters to the disembodied head.

Some of them, like this Cookie Monster filter, Masa said were “cute,” but we respectfully disagree.

▼ It is just…too gleefully eating those cookies.

Also very alarming is the image of a ghostly Luffy (from pirate anime One Piece) coming at you with a Gum Gum Storm. When you’re trying to run away and this thing comes up flailing its fists at you, you might even let out a little scream.

But perhaps the scariest is the filter where you can put a face in Ash Ketchum’s, as part of a video sequence with Pikachu. When coupled with the floating face, it is…incredibly disturbing.

▼ No one wants to watch this version of Pokémon.

Okay, well, maybe the filters aren’t that scary, but they certainly don’t make the game any more pleasant to play! Some of the filters are actually pretty funny, so it’s worth watching the video through for a good laugh.

In retrospect, however, the filters may have fit a bit better on the psychological horror game Doki Doki Literature Club…as if that game needed to do any more to hide its sinister undertones.

Source: Nico Nico Videos/Masa via My Game News Flash
Images: Nico Nico Videos/Masa