Mizzurna Falls

One dull November evening, while mindlessly scrolling trough my youtube feed, I bumped into a seemingly random video¹ about old PlayStation 1 games. This was my unexpected introduction to Mizzurna Falls.

Now, I’m a sucker for two things in visual art: snowy scenery and Twin Peaks so just seeing the game’s cover art was enough to draw my attention to it. But regardless of your visual preferences, I feel like there is a lot of universal beauty to be found in this obscure gem. So let’s dig in.

Some facts first

Mizzurna Falls is a 1998 open-world adventure developed and published by Human Entertainment², now former Japanese game studio. The game takes place in a fictional town of Mizzurna Falls in the State of Colorado, USA.

As we learn from the intro cinematic, two tragedies have struck this peaceful town on the Christmas morning of 1998. First, a local girl named Kathy Flannery was found in the woods with severe injuries (suspected bear attack according to the local police). An hour later her classmate, Emma Roland, was reported missing by her parents.

The game then cuts to a scene where Matthew Williams (you), Emma’s good friend, wakes up to a phone call where he is handed the grim news. From then on, Matthew sets on a 7-day race against the clock, leading his own investigation to find Emma before it’s too late.

What’s so special about this game?

The first thing that stands out and probably the boring version of this answer is: technical aspects which were way ahead of their time. Way before Driver³ and GTA⁴, this game allowed you to freely roam its open map by foot, car or rowing across the lake. This is combined by a real day-night and weather cycles where every in-game minute lasts about 5 seconds in our time⁵. This means that there is a fixed window in which you need to resolve the mystery or the game will just end on the evening of December 31st leaving you with a dead classmate.

If this wasn’t enough to breathe life into this imaginary mountain town, every character in it follows their own schedule during these 7 days. This means that NPCs are not there just for decor, you can follow each one of them around to find out what they are up to, or when you see a car passing by, you can be sure there is a person inside ready to pop out when it parks. So the town keeps on living with or without you withnessing it. There is a slight horror element in the story but the real unease comes from these two things: constant time flow and the fear or missing out. As a person that has an anxiety of being late, this was a real torture for me.

Another innovative element is the save system. You cannot save your progress whenever you want or on a fixed checkpoint. Instead, the only place where you can do it is the Matthew’s place, when you decide it’s time for sleep. Of course, this will cost you an hour (or five, your choice) of your precious time. So best way to go about this is to let Matthew sleep trough the nights when there isn’t much going on around town. Apart from making this game even more difficult, I feel like this is another aspect that makes Mizzurna Falls feel like home. These little rituals. There is a local bar where you, and other familiar faces, end up most of the days in the game and you have your little home where you routinely go to sleep every night. I really made sure to park my car nicely when returning home, pet my dog on the way in and take a shower every night before sleep.

If it wasn’t already obvious, this game is so hard that it’s probably impossible to get the good ending (one where Emma survives, to be clear) in one go. It is absurdly easy to miss a key event or an item and half of the times, there is absolutely no hint about it. For example, a freaking map, the ultimate necessity when navigating the game is only found laying around in a random room with the option to pick it up hidden behind a line of dialog with an adjacent NPC. This is made a bit easier by the fact that the whole town lives trough the same drama as you, so you can find information about important events from a few different people on a few different locations. Another big problem is the event layering: sometimes you can trigger multiple events at once, e.g. a cut-scene would start when you arrive at a location and someone will call you on the phone at the same time, making it possible to miss a crucial event by just being at a wrong place at a wrong time. On top of the difficulty, user experience is additionally ruined by visual glitches and overall clunkiness of the controls.

Personally, I didn’t quite like the level design aspect of the town. Particularly, some parts of it were not connected in (at least to me) a logical way. For example, it made me hard to believe that Kathy escaped from the church all the way the forrest on foot. By car, this trip will last for almost an hour and there is no obvious shortcut that a pedestrian can take (see map below). So it’s not all roses in the ol’ Mizzurna Falls but the patience to live trough its flaws is generously rewarded.

Luckily, there is one aspect of the game that doesn’t make your life harder and that’s resource management. Everything is free in Mizzurna falls so you can have all the burgers you want in the local diner even though you don’t have to worry about keeping Matthew fed. Yes, you need to keep your car’s gas tank full but this thing has pretty good gas mileage so your trips to the gas station will more often be part of the quest than to fill up the car. One neat detail about it: If you ever ran out of gas (or your car gets stuck in a badly designed map texture), you can always call the local tow service and they will gladly pick it up and leave it at your desired location. According to the game creator, Taichi Ishizuka, money system was one of the things he regrets is not in the game⁶ but I think it turned out nice because it shifted the ballance towards playability a bit.

Now, to be fair, I did play through the game by following the guide⁷ and using the emulator that enabled me to save and load whenever I want so I feel a bit bad complaining about the game’s difficulty. But the fear of missing out was so real and these days I barely have time for one decent playtrough so this was my only chance to experience it completely.

As I mentioned in the intro, Twin Peaks⁸ is a clear inspiration for Mizzurna Falls and its creator is not shy about it also⁶. You have a small American town, seemingly harmonious and peaceful with a lot of skeletons in the closet that keep popping out as the story unfolds. Same as Laura Palmer, Emma is a local darling that’s in the middle of the tragedy the story revolves around and, of course, there is the (slightly remote) resident bar where she likes to unleash her hidden side from time to time. Now, Mizzurna Falls relies on supernatural and horror elements far less than its role model but there is still a slight paranormal undertone to it. I just wished it was a bit more weird.

Cult status

Main reason for the game’s obscurity is the fact it’s only been released in Japan and in Japanese language. So most of the world was unable to buy and play it at the time. The fact that Human Entertainment went bust after the game was released didn’t help the situation either. Taichi Ishizuka also left game business altogether and moved to Canada where you can find him working as a hiking tour guide⁹. But more than a decade after it originally came out, the game started to creep slowly onto western cultural radars mainly trough individual outlets like personal blog posts¹⁰¹¹.

A big change came with the start of the Project Mizzurna¹², a fan-made English translation of the full game by a person known as residenteevee. The same one that’s behind the walktrough⁷ that got me trough the game! It seems to be a very long and tedious project and looks like there have been a lot of issues along the way, which I am not too familiar with. You can read all about it on their blog and generally online. I was lucky enough to stumble upon a fully playable PS1 image of the game with this translation already baked in so I guess it’s possible to find it with a bit of Googling around.

It’s easy to conclude that this post wouldn’t have happened with all the hard work of residenteevee so I would like to wrap it up by a huge thank you to the person behind the pseudonym.