Aijin

Aijin is a psychological horror game that follows someone returning home in 2022 after being sent to an internet-addiction rehabilitation camp. The camp used drills, instructors, shock therapy and isolation. Back in Old Town, the protagonist’s Sanity keeps slipping, blood seeps through the walls and unfamiliar doors appear. Haru, a smiling, teasing girl, sometimes seems to look past the protagonist and directly at you.

Explore Old Town

In first-person, you cross the street, an apartment block and a pitch-black sewer on the way from home to school. Sanity drains over time, and when it runs low, the map begins to change. You ration a dying flashlight, search your inventory, read what was left behind and solve combination locks and old terminals. If you hear laughter, the Woman in Red is close.

The places you visit include Reality, the Prologue, the Land of Flesh, the Second World and the Ending Worlds. Old Town’s otherworldly locations include a dungeon of living flesh that breathes around you and a gothic castle made from your home by Haru. The Woman in Red, the Zombie Instructor, the White Ghost, Professor Yang and another figure at the bottom of the upside-down world are waiting there.

Cross between worlds

Using Crow’s-Eye Tincture freezes the 3D world and sends you to the Land of Flesh, a 2D side-scrolling otherworld where you play as Haru, whose eyes are hidden behind a mosaic. Doors opened there also open in reality; if your Sanity runs out in the otherworld, you collapse in reality.

On a second playthrough, Haru enters as the Intruder in a GBA-style pixel Metroidvania. You can use nine weapons, armor, accessories, an air dash, a grapple and a high jump. Defeating a 2D boss removes its 3D counterpart for good. Finding both tallies turns the whole world upside down.

Endings and records

The game has seven endings, each changing how the game plays and looks while showing the same wound from another angle. Their settings and forms include a dreamcore suburb, a visual novel, the Backrooms and a heart that will not stop beating. One ending may even recognize you. The endings listed are False Ending · Eternal Suburbia, Truth Ending, Backrooms Ending, Distress Signal, Perfect Ending and Heart Ending; another ending is hidden.

The Codex contains 43 characters, monsters and bosses from Reality, the Prologue, the Land of Flesh, the Second World and the Ending Worlds. Entries are recorded only after you see a subject with your own eyes or land a hit, and every portrait switches between 3D and 2D.