Otogirisō

Otogirisō is a 1992 visual novel video game developed and published by Chunsoft for the Super Famicom. It is about an unnamed protagonist and his girlfriend Nami who are lost down a forest road. After having to make an emergency stop, they find themselves in a Western-styled country house. On entering, they stumble upon a mummified person who quickly vanishes when the lights go out. Further unexplainable phenomena happen as the two explore the mansion, and the two discover that Nami has a history with the house and its previous occupants. The game involves the player making various choices through menu options to direct the narrative of the story. Completing a narrative in the game allows the player to reach new menu branches and narrative conclusions.

Director Koichi Nakamura developed the game, following the financial success Chunsoft had with their Dragon Quest series. On attempting to attract new audiences, Chunsoft developed a simplified game where the player only chose various narrative branches via menu options to progress the story, later describing this type of game as a "Sound Novel". On its release for the Super Famicom, reviewers in Weekly Famitsu found the game difficult to review, but recommended it for adventure game fans. In January 1993, GAME Pia magazine included Otogirisō in their list of the best games of 1992. The game sold around 300,000 copies.

Otogirisō was adapted into a radio drama in 1992 and a film in 2001. A video game remake titled Otogirisō soseihen was released in 1999 for the PlayStation, while a Otogirisō game titled Kirigirisō was released in 2016. Along with Chunsoft's Banshee's Last Cry (1994), Otogirisō had a direct influence on contemporary visual novel games due to their unique format of placing text over illustrated backgrounds rather than confining it to dedicated text boxes. This style would become the model for similar games such as Leaf's Shizuku (1996) and Kizuato (1996).