And the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the hexed day...
Tsugu no Hinote also known as The Hexed Day is a series of browser horror games made by the indie developer ImCyan. The gameplay is mainly just "press left" but what is alluring isn't the gameplay but rather the scares and the stories. The main premise of the game is that horror slowly creeps into someone's everyday life. As mankind has advanced they begin to invade the territory of spirits, this "Sin" causes the spirit realm to invade the world of the living in return and each day become more and more corrupted for the victims.
Each game focuses on a different incident of these so called "hexed days" experienced by either one person or a group of people (or in one case, a cat). The games are known for using photo like images for it's characters, giving them an eerie sense of realism.
The first and the second series are included in the Steam version published by PLAYISM in August 2021.
Games
First series
- Tsugu no Hi Episode 1
- Tsugu no Hi Episode 2
- Tsugu no Hi Episode 3
Second series
- Tsugu no Hi -A Closed Future-
- Tsugu no Hi -The Cat Ghost-
- Tsugu no Hi -The Parallel Train in the Dark-
- Tsugu no Hi -Whispering Toy House-
- Tsugu no Hi -The Call from Showa-
Steam-original
- Tsugu no Hi -The Ethereal Railroad Crossing-
- Tsugu no Hi -Supernatural Supermarket- (DLC)
- Ai’s Silent Cries (A crossover with Kizuna AI)
- Evil God Korone (A crossover with Inugami Korone)
- Zombie Scream -Zekkyo Shibito- (A crossover work with Odaken)
- Truth of Beauty Witch ~Marine's Treasure Ship~ (A crossover with Houshou Marine)
Death Smell -Another episode 1-
- Death Smell
- Pack Smell (packman parody)
Uramikko -Another episode 2-
- Uramikko Episode 1 Sachi Mikura
- Uramikko Episode 2 Yui Nishino, Kyosuke Ando
- Uramikko Episode 3 Mizuho Kobayashi
- Uramikko Death Episode Mizuho Kobayashi, Sachi Mikura, Yui Nishino
- Uramikko Back route (Joke version)
Shikiyoku -Teru Yumemi is Dreaming-
- Shikiyoku Episode 1 Disappearance of the high school girls
- Shikiyoku Episode 2 Host Disappearance Case
- Shikiyoku Episode 3 Scissor Girl Street Magic Case
- Shikiyoku Episode 4 Underground Idol Disappearance Case
- Shikiyoku Episode 5 Parasitic Surface Incident
- Shikiyoku Episode 6 The Case Four Years Ago
- Shikiyoku Episode 7 Night Festival Spirited Away Case
- Shikiyoku Episode 8 Yumemi Case
- Shikiyoku Episode 9 Mimiko Yumemi Disappearance Case
- Shikiyoku Special Edition Mermaid Case Part 1
- Shikiyoku Special Edition Mermaid Case Part 2
- Shikiyoku Old Mermaid Incident (originally episode 1)
Other works
- Tsugu no Hi manganote
- Death Smell the movie
- Shikiyoku Yonkoma
Tropes applying to Tsugu no Hi:
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Main Series
- And Then John Was a Zombie: The Cat Ghost ends with the main cat-racter becoming a feline apparition. The Whispering Toy House ends with the girl being transformed into a doll and stuck in the toy house forever.
- Arc Words: "You can see me, right?" from The Call from Showa. After killing the protagonist, the ghost girl promptly directs this question at YOU.
- The Bad Guy Wins: By the end, the evil spirits always win. Except for in Evil God Korone, where there is actually a good ending.
- Beta Test Baddie: The villain of Ai’s Silent Cries is implied to be the original version of the A.I that would become Kizuna Ai.
- Bittersweet Ending: The Ethereal Railroad Crossing ends with the protagonist's death by being run over, but her last moments are to hug and comfort her dead twin sister's spirit, joining her in death, and the credits have them sitting beside each other, seemingly content being together once again."We'll be together forever."
- The Blank: Except for the cat and the ghosts, all characters lack eyes.
- Body Horror: Let's just say becoming a Koronesuki is... not a very pleasant experience. Your head is shaved bald, your fingers are chopped off, you get forced into a device that forces your eyes open and contorts your face into a constant smile, and said device will eventually snap off, causing your entire head to become bloated and the smile to become permanent.
- Call-Back: A Closed Future has a brief cameo of the main character from the first game. Ghost boy riding on his back and all. The Ethereal Railroad Crossing also features the protagonist from The Parallel Train in the Dark appearing at the start of the game, as the latter game actually occurs after the events of the former.
- Creepy Child: The ghost boy in the first game. Also the spirit of Kana Mizuki and Tsugumi's apparition after she dies.. The ghost of the twintailed girl in The Ethereal Railroad Crossing slams straight into your face, grinning madly at you with her eyeless face until her head falls off with a disgusting sound.
- Creepy Doll: A group of fairly creepy looking puppets appear to haunt the protagonist on the second and third days in Truth of Beauty Witch, appearing to be forcibly gagged and dumped in random places. Subverted on the hexed day, where they're revealed to be Good All Along and were silenced by Marine to stop them from telling the protagonist the truth about her, and actively try to help him escape Marine's grasp.
- Dead All Along: The ending of A Closed Future. It's implied that girl truly only killed her self the first time she died, and every "Groundhog Day" Loop has just been a Dying Dream or some sort of afterlife torture.
- Dirty Cop: The cop from the third game does nothing to help find Tsugumi's mother and even laughs in her husband's face... but it's not his fault. He's fallen victim to whatever possessed/controlled her.
- Downer Ending: The vast majority of the games' stories end in horrifying downers, with very few exceptions such as The Ethereal Railroad Crossing whose ending is arguably more bittersweet, Evil God Korone has a good ending that's utterly hilarious, and Truth of Beauty Witch's downer ending still manages to be hilarious in its own way.
- Driven to Suicide: The girl from A Closed Future kills herself in order to reset the day.
- Environmental Narrative Game: The games have no controls besides going forward. Your only other option is to do nothing, but there are no cases where that progresses the narration.
- Eyeless Face: The onryos that appear seem to have this.
- Eye Scream: Supernatural Supermarket has this befall the poor employees (Meguro and Yoshimura) and customers that go missing, having nails driven into their eyes. And the protagonist Kiritachi eventually suffers the same fate.
- Failed a Spot Check: Played for horror in Supernatural Supermarket. On the second day, the manager asks Kiritachi where Meguro is, even though Meguro's standing right beside her. And then the manager shows Kiritachi the missing person poster, and it's revealed that Meguro was spirited away.
- Failure Is the Only Option: No matter how often the girl in A Closed Future loops time, she fails at the thing she was trying to succeed at, and just when she finally realizes the mistake she's been making all along, she runs out of tries.
- Fan Disservice: The majority of the horror from Truth of Beauty Witch comes from this trope. What's that? A beautiful sexy pirate captain makes seductive advances towards our protagonist? Niiiiice. Said captain turns out to be an ugly old hag who still does her whole being sexy shtick? OH GOD NO.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: The apparitions and scares aren't designed to scare the protagonist, they're meant to scare YOU with how they often pop up right in your face, to the protagonist's seeming obliviousness. Especially the final sequence of The Call from Showa, where the ghost girl suddenly turns to look straight at the player after turning the protagonist into stone, flashing an evil Slasher Smile and advancing until she gets very, VERY uncomfortably close to your face. After that, her sadistic grin is perpetually plastered on the screen should you decide to go through the game again.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: A Closed Future consists of a girl lamenting how her day was a failure wishing to redo it, walking to the river and drowning herself, then starting the day again... and again... but more and more apparitions start showing up each time... and then it turns out that you can't redo the past, and she's been Dead All Along.
- Hell Is That Noise: The appearance of an apparition is often accompanied with a ghastly wail. Another recurring sound that plays in all the games is the sound of something gruesome and disgusting.
- Hope Spot: The girl in A Closed Future decides to stop re-doing the day, because she's tired of failing, and it looks like she's going to pass the river without jumping... well, maybe just one more time. Just once.
- Truth of the Beauty Witch has Marine getting struck with lightning just before she catches up to the protagonist. It does nothing to stop her, just slightly smoke her, and still manages to catch up with and capture him again.
- Jump Scare: You encounter a lot of them as you keep moving.
- Lighter and Softer: Truth of Beauty Witch is significantly more light-hearted and comedic compared to the previous entries. While there still are scares to be had, they are nowhere near as horrifying as the other games and tend to veer into Black Comedy at worst, and said scares are also built on an inherently amusing trope: Fan Disservice.
- Misplaced Retribution: The spirits seem to have a grudge on mankind in general and take it out on regular humans (and kitties!) who haven't really done anything wrong.
- Multiple Endings:
- Episode 2 has a joke ending where the protagonist sees her older brother crossdressing instead of the girl in red on the third day, acting all weird. The sight of this offends the girl in red so much, she actually charges at him screaming at him to die, and takes him away into the darkness, to the protagonist's bewilderment.
- Evil God Korone has a good ending and a bad ending. The horrifying bad ending is obtained if the protagonist answers the Koronesukis that he does like Korone, leading to him being turned into a Koronesuki. The hilarious good ending is achieved by ignoring the Koronesukis' question and walking away from them, leading to Korone getting arrested.
- Truth of the Beauty Witch has a variation. After the first run, one of the dolls resets the game to the title screen, now with the words "True Story" and a new route with its own ending.
- Mundangerous: Despite the heavy focus on the supernatural throughout the series, the good ending of Evil God Korone ends with Korone, a brainwashing cult leader, simply being arrested by completely mundane police officers.
- Named by the Adaptation:
- Supernatural Supermarket is the first game to start giving names to the major characters, with Yumi Kiritachi as the protagonist, Asuna Meguro as her co-worker, and Mai Yoshimura as one of the missing employees.
- In the Death Smell movie, the boy from the first chapter is named Kimura, the girl from the second is named Miyuki Uchida. Tsugumi is given the surname Mishima and her parents are named Satomi and Shunichi. The cop who is killed is Makoto Tachibana.
- Nerves of Steel: Yumi Kiritachi of Supernatural Supermarket is easily the toughest protagonist in the series by far. She navigates through the spirit realm in without flinching too much, determined to rescue her kouhai Meguro, and even on the hexed day where she gets a nail in her right eye and is clearly weakened, she manages to carry her blinded manager on her back (mind you, the manager is a grown adult man and she's a 17 year-old girl) and still pushes further to try and find an escape route. It isn't until the very last scene that she tragically breaks and falls.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The first day of the earlier games usually have no apparitions to be found save at the very end, and even then, they're often barely noticeable and can be easily missed. Later games avert this, presenting a few of the horrors to come right off the bat.
- Scare Chord: A horrifying musical sting plays at the end of the hexed day to signify just how screwed the protagonists are. The Ethereal Railroad Crossing crosses it over into a more somber tune to signify the tragedy of the situation instead.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The protagonist's mother in The Call from Showa was heavily implied to also be able to see the ghost girl in the grandmother's house, and eventually fled to the city to raise her daughter away from its influence. One sign that things are seriously going wrong is when the protagonist's grandmother mistakes her for her mother, talking about the ghost sighting.
- Shout-Out: Supernatural Supermarket features a cute plushie of the ghost boy from the first game, aptly named Tsugunohi-kun. But poor Tsugunohi-kun gets taken by the spirit realm too...
- Silliness Switch:
- Episode 2 has an alternate joke route which initially starts off the same until the third day, where instead of the girl in red, the protagonist instead sees her big brother crossdressing and making funny poses, which offends the girl in red so much she actually charges at him, screaming at him to die and promptly takes him away, all to the protagonist's bewilderment, and the game ends there.
- Averted at first with Evil God Korone, which starts off just as sinister as the rest of the Tsugu No Hi games, with the cutesy Korone being portrayed as a terrible abomination spearheading a twisted cult of Koronesukis. The bad ending doubles down on the horror, where the protagonist is forcibly turned into a Koronesuki with all the Body Horror it entails, but the good ending veers away from the horror and goes straight into comedy, with Korone being arrested and smacked silly by the police.
- Truth of Beauty Witch is noticeably a lot more silly and comedic compared to the other entries, especially if you're familiar with who Houshou Marine is. While it still has its creepy moments, it's nowhere near as bad as the previous games.
- Suicide by Sea: The girl in the "Groundhog Day" Loop from A Closed Future kills herself by pitching herself into the river. Over and over.
- Soul Eating: The apparition in the third game seems to be one of these, turning those it possesses/spirits away into what look like telephone poles or signs and then eating them in the other world.
- Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: Most of the female ghosts tend to be onryos.
- Taken for Granite: The grisly fate of the protagonist and her grandmother in The Call from Showa.
- Together in Death: The Ethereal Railroad Crossing ends with the protagonist getting run over by the same train that killed her twin sister, joining her in the spirit realm.
- Trapped in the Past: The ghost girl in The Call from Showa warps the protagonist and her grandmother back to 1943 Japan during World War II, where they end up getting killed.
- Tropey, Come Home: The main character of The Cat Ghost is a lost cat, as we learn in the final chapter. He doesn't get found, at least not by anything human....
- Uncanny Valley: A major portion of what makes the games so damn terrifying is their photo-realistic art style, making everything look utterly inhuman.
- Weirdness Censor: The main characters of the games seem unable to perceive the strangeness around them, or at least disregard it, until it's too late. Subverted in The Call from Showa, where the main character is quite aware of the ghost girl's presence constantly whispering to her, and only she seems to notice.
- Yandere: Evil God Korone asks: Do you like Inugami Korone? If so, you better only like her, or else.
"Another Episode" (Uramikko) Series
- Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The ghost Shikiko from Uramikko can only live on as long as people hear the legend about her.
- Faux First Person 3D: A few scenes are done in a typical Tsugu no Hi fasion, but the games are almost entirely about exploring the school in a grid-based first person dungeon fashion.
- Four Is Death: A recurring element in Uramikko. What separates the spirit Shikiko and the real Shikiko is the first kanji or their first name. The student has "four" while the spirit has "death".
- Kill and Replace: The ghost Shikiko killed the real student Shikiko Muraoka and took her name, becoming the Shikiko of the urban legend.
- Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: Kana and Yukie in Death Smell.
- Talking the Monster to Death: In the end of Death Smell, when the main character has figured it all out and goes to bury Yukie's corpse, he runs into the other ghosts and expresses sympathy for them. His kindness is enough for them to move on.
Shikiyoku Series
- Angsty Surviving Twin: "Yuri".
- But Not Too Foreign: Jason is half Japanese, half American.
- Calling Parents by Their Name: Mimiko had Teru call her "teacher", one of the things that drove them apart.
- Clingy Jealous Girl: Luna and Mimiko for Teru.
- Covert Pervert: When Yuri is fantasizing about Teru making her his "bride" she starts thinking about them making children.
- Gender-Blender Name: The American woman is for some reason called Jason. Then again, it could be an alias.
- Horrifying the Horror: Subverted. In the Akihabara chapter Luna and Yuri are stalked by a creep and Yuri unleashes her psychotic side to scare him away. However it turns out he wasn't a creep, he was just socially awkward.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Nina can detach her head from the rest of her body somehow.
- Unwanted Harem: The women who meet Teru throughout the series start fawning over him pretty quickly, much to his distress.
