The Obscure PlayStation Game that Brought Lovecraft to Japanese Horror
In ...Iru!, They’re Here and Always Have Been

1998 is, perhaps, gaming’s most important year. Many titles that could (and do) easily receive the moniker of “best game of all time” came out in 1998, and, with them, carry a certain eeriness or morbidity that pervades each title. The grim temples of Ocarina of Time,, the frenzied escape at the center of Half-Life, and the sheer terror of Resident Evil 2 that has yet to be recreated paint a picture of an intensely sinister atmosphere, beset by innovations in graphics, music, and controls that feel just empty, just uncanny, just constricted enough to spark chills even unintentionally.
This was the climate in which Soft Machine’s …Iru! (or …They’re here!) was released. The company had previously assisted developing mildly successful sports and trivia games for the Famicom and TurboGrafx-16, making …Iru! an anomaly in their repertoire. A survival horror game on the surface, …Iru! is much more akin to a horror-themed adventure game, complete with strange puzzles and difficult flags to proceed in the story. The game has a simplified version of Clock Tower’s stalker system, in which an assailant may appear and the protagonist, Inaba, may have to find a hiding spot before he’s discovered. Unlike Clock Tower, there are only a few specific instances in which you have to hide, and you’re immediately ushered into a room you know possesses a suitable hiding spot.
In other words, most of the game is spent wandering empty, desolate halls listening to a highly compressed soundtrack, searching for miniscule clues like marbles and memos. It’s notable for its first-person view, made more popular in the horror genre by FromSoftware’s Echo Night and Hellnight (both released the same year!). The concept of first-person exploratory horror would, of course, become a mainstay in the Western market a decade later, so this gameplay style feels familiar and serviceable despite the occasionally unwieldy controls.
…Iru! follows Inaba, an exchange student attending Kirigaoka High, which is located on a secluded island, the night before a festival as he and some of his classmates stay overnight at school to finish preparations. He’s besieged by premonitory dreams of his classmates being murdered and wakes up to the school mostly empty and sealed off. With a pretty brief runtime, …Iru! feels like a fairly memorable short story, with plot threads cast out and succinctly wrapped up in just a couple hours.
The result is something of a pastiche of cosmic horror tropes, drawing references from not only the works of Lovecraft but of his contemporary Frank Belknap Long and his predecessor Robert W. Chambers. The story would not be remiss as a procedurally generated tale strung together by the roguelite RPG World of Horror, given its patching together of disparate but equally profane lore and stories in a twisted tale of madness and depravity. This isn’t to say it isn’t effective in what it sets out to do—drawing most heavily from Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.”