Indie Kickstarter Wants to Bring Americans a new Neighbor

J-horror and cult classic indie fans have a new Kickstarter to take all their cash. Indie localizer OTUSUN LAND is working to bring Japanese visual novel Neighbor to the United States for the first time, as well as re-releasing in Japan. They say this can be done by August for $5,000, including their plans for complete redevelopment and multiple language localization of the game. On the financial front, at least, they have a little wiggle room. With nearly a month left on their campaign, the team has already raised 1.5 times their initial goal.

Neighbor was originally a free game produced by Rosalia with the sponsorship of several other companies. None of these still exist today, making chances for a re-release by anyone originally involved in the project slim. OTUSUN LAND saw that slim chance as a great opportunity to renew the game themselves, as staff member Ayune is the original writer and holds all rights to the game. They’ve since hatched a plan to bring Neighbor back to life for modern PCs, as well as Android and iOS. The game is a kinetic visual novel, so there are no choices and a single story path with one ending.

That singular path follows freelance designer Yuuki Kae as her apartment building becomes a hellish prison. She is aided in her pursuit of the truth by an upstairs neighbor, Hisamatsu Daigo. Together, they search for clues about the strange apartment next door to Kae, empty but unavailable for rent. Static over the intercoms and ghostly hands through the door are merely the beginning, and the people in her building may be the end.

