Way, way back in June last year we brought word about the minor localization issue that faced Japanese gothic horror visual novel The House in Fata Morgana. In short, it was suffering from a lack of localization funds.
This despite the Japanese devs flooring the Playism indie gaming platform site by saying they wanted all the proceeds from their Japanese version to go towards translating the game into English. Sales being lower than expected at the time, however, meant there simply wasn’t enough going in to fund a translation. That doesn’t mean the game just rolled over died, though.
Instead, this quietly horrific game that has won Japan doujin game awards is still plodding on, and Playism have released released a demo of the first two chapters for gamers to check out by downloading here. Playism tells us that the demo features early in-progress text that has yet to be polished, which will be ironed out and fixed “as soon as possible”.
The House in Fata Morgana will deal with such awful, horrible, scary things as tragedy, human deeds and insanity. You play as an amnesiac trying to unlock the mysteries of the cursed mansion you’re now stuck in. The final version has 8 endings, not inclusive of Bad Ends, and features 65 different tracks from 5 composers all in.
You can try the first two chapter’s in the demo for The Fate in Fata Morgana here and check out the bevy of screenshots and art below. Playism tell us that localization of the game is still underway, and that they’re exploring various funding options.