Cijian Appearance

Cijian Appearance is a supernatural horror story about university student An He and his close friend Shi Santian, who sneak onto campus on a winter night to retrieve a misdelivered love letter. They find a bloodstained human-skin Nuo mask inscribed with the spell “With your soul, sacrifice for my life.” When An He touches it, pain tears through his temple and a golden eye opens there, revealing horrors: blood seeping from an office wall and a body hanging outside the window, wearing the same mask.

A curse across ages

As An He and his companions investigate, they encounter scenes tied to a curse that stretches back a thousand years: children kneel before a golden statue at a ruined temple, offering a rotting human head; an old woman eats wild greens in a woodshed as black blood seeps from a cut on her neck; and a night watchman walks upside down, his face beneath the mask rotted to bone. The uncanny is both the source of the curse and a force awakened to resist fate.

An He’s golden eye can turn to ash, leaving his body as a living monument that seals the mask. If he falls into corruption, horns grow from his forehead and he is worshipped by ghosts at an altar. The story asks whether he can preserve his humanity when the divine oracle itself is a lie.

The characters

• Xie Anhe: Outwardly carefree but perceptive and sensitive. The search for Shi Santian’s letter awakens the mask’s curse, gives him a golden eye associated with spiritual sight and lets him gradually glimpse the truth of the worlds of the living and the dead.
• Shi Santian: The misdelivered letter sets off the chain of disasters. Though he seems timid, he would risk anything for his friend. He has a secret crush on Yao Yao, and guilt drives him to follow An He into danger.
• Yao Yao: Her father disappeared because of the curse. She joins the expedition to learn what happened to him, having noticed similarities between his disappearance and An He’s circumstances. Behind her image as a perfect goddess lies a family debt of blood.
• Xu San: Yao Yao’s uncle, who carries the camera left behind by his older brother. He travels to Qingchuan to protect her and knows part of the truth about the disappearance years earlier.
• Yi’er: The “ghost girl” of Qingchuan Village.
• Jian: A character named in the story description.

Story and endings

The game contains about 65,000 Chinese characters of story text and numerous CG illustrations, and takes around 3–5 hours to play. It has four bad endings, one happy ending and one neutral ending.