Otogirisō wasn’t marketed as a video game but instead a sound novel, today called a visual novel. Koichi Nakamura conceived the title after showing his work on the Dragon Quest games to a girl he was dating. She didn’t understand the game or why people would want to play it, so he decided to make a video game “for people who haven’t played games before.”

Obviously, his work was inspired by another video game that led to a series of better-known games (and movies), Sweet Home. Nakamura said, “The thing that was really interesting about Sweet Home was that it so scary that you didn’t want to continue playing. I wanted to create an experience where the user would be too afraid to press the button to continue the story, too.”

It’s less of a game and more of a Choose Your Own Adventure novel where you make choices at different point as you and your girlfriend Nami survive a car accident and arrive at a mansion. Nobody answers when they ring the bell, so of course they go inside.

If you play emulated games, you can try it out here in English.

Nami Kaizawa (Megumi Okina) has inherited her family’s money and gigantic home, which holds bad memories as her father, who abandoned her. Deciding that she should explore it, she takes her ex-boyfriend Kohei Matsudaira (Yoichiro Saito), who is a fan of her father’s sinister paintings. He has already decided that the house would be perfect for a new video game that he is working on with Nami, so he brings a web camera and sends back footage to his friends and fellow designers Toko Ozeki (Reiko Matsuo) and Soichi Kaizawa (Reiko Matsuo).

The film is not just a video game movie, but literally like a Twitch channel, as we see the designers drawing maps of the house as Nami and Kohei make their way through the secret rooms and keys that you would expect to look for in a game just like this.

Directed by Shimoyama Ten, this has strange multihued visuals that are very 2001, but that’s the joy of it to me. It plays with the idea of what is real and what is the game — like eXistenZ — and has creepy dolls, a frightening caretaker, a heroine with memory lapses and plenty of gore. As I got into other reviews, I couldn’t believe so many people didn’t like it as much as me. Maybe I watching other people enjoy games?

St. John’s Wort is one of the films on Arrow’s new J-Horror Rising set. It has extras including commentary by Japanese cinema expert Amber T.; a making of feature; interviews with actors Megumi Okina, Koichiro Saito, Reiko Matsuo and Koji Okura; trailers; TV commercials and an image gallery.

You can buy it from MVD.