The Collection Chamber: IRU! (...THEY'RE HERE!)

A realistic horror adventure

Something is about to happen on the day before the school festival...

I can see it. I can feel it. What's...there...?

Can you escape the creeping terror?!?

As the protagonist, you'll be attacked by the terrifying, inhuman creatures lurking around the school.

This horror adventure game will shock you with psychological terror and horrifying graphics, as you'll be terrified by creatures that may be hiding in the shadows and walls!
There are dead bodies everywhere at school!!
One Tragedy after another.
Explore the school freely in 3D space.
Anyway, hide and escape!

~ badly translated from the front and back of the box

There's something irresistibly eerie about empty schools after dark. The endless corridors, the neatly stacked desks, the abandoned hints of a place once brimming with life - a spooky liminal space of unrest and unease. …Iru! (or …They're Here!, thanks to SnowyAria's fine fan translation) turns that unease into a slow, surreal descent into a Lovecraftian nightmare that's sure to pique the interest of any horror buff. Released exclusively for Japanese PlayStations in 1998, this little-known adventure game traps you in a high school overnight for what should've been a harmless rehearsal for a forthcoming festival celebration. Instead, you and your classmates find yourselves stalked by something unearthly. It's a premise that can proudly sit alongside the J-horror classics like Ring or The Grudge, and it's surprisingly effective considering the hardware at play.

Visually, it may not be in keeping with the best the system has to offer yet its first-person view of blocky polygonal hallways still evoke a creaky charm. The environments are sparse but believable, and the low-resolution textures give the impression of a half-remembered nightmare. You can almost smell the chalk dust and old gym mats. The sound design is what really sells it, though. Lonely footsteps echo across empty corridors, doors creak in unnatural rhythm, and the faintest hint of whispering makes you think twice about opening that next classroom door. It's not particularly polished, but its imperfections amplify the tension as if it was made to be played through a CRT haze at two in the morning.

Access your inventory via the Options menu by pressing the Square button (left).
It should be pretty obvious when and where to use them, like feeding this blob a jar of flesh (right).

Mechanically, it shares the ethos of a classic point-and-click adventure as opposed to a survival horror. You explore rooms, talk to classmates, pick up key items, and piece together the school's unfolding mystery. There's no combat, which makes encounters with the demonic blobs far more unnerving. When danger strikes, you can only run. The game will then display a "distance meter" showing how close your pursuer is, a primitive but effective anxiety gauge. Most of your time is spent investigating, though, and here …Iru! plays more like an interactive ghost story than an action game.

If you're not into the story or atmosphere, all of this hall wandering can become slow and plodding. Progress often depends on speaking to a specific student or revisiting a certain room at the right time, with little indication of what's changed. The school is big enough to make wandering aimlessly a real possibility, and the game's internal logic can be cryptic even with English text. I've translated the manual (you're welcome) which helps, but there's no substitute for old-fashioned trial and error. Still, every small victory - a new key, clue, or conversation - feels earned, and another lesson of the school's history is learned.

Find message boards with this sigil to save your game (left).
Classrooms have handy signs to tell you what's on the other side (right).

The story itself unfolds in a Lynchian fashion. What begins as a supernatural prank snowballs into an occult ritual gone awry, and the deeper you go, the less sure you are of what's real. Characters drift in and out of the plot, some vanishing mysteriously, others offering cryptic hints before their inevitable demise. …Iru! never overexplains its ghosts but by the gods is their presence - or absence - hauntingly unnerving.

Saving your progress is done through eerie message boards hidden throughout the school. These chalkboards bear strange sigils, as if you're signing away your soul with every save. There's no autosave to bail you out, so it's wise to save often whenever you stumble upon any of them. I found the one at the dead end of a hallway on the third floor to be particularly useful. Inventory management is just as straightforward with each items able to be examined and used from the Options Screen. It's more functional than flashy, with no complex combinations or management, just a simple use-it-when-you-need-it puzzle design. Essentially, everything is a form of key. One key will open a locked classroom, that gemstone unlocks knowledge, that jar of flesh unlocks access to the third-floor stairwell (don't ask). The puzzle design is fairly basic and straightforward, but the real difficulty comes from exploration and diverging story progression.

Characters will move after every event, so you'll spend a lot of time hunting them down (left).
Sometimes curiosity kills the cat, or in this instance, a lizard demon kills the player (right).

SnowyAria's English translation is what makes all of this newly accessible, and it's a labour of love that deserves applause. Dialogue is clear and natural, item descriptions make sense, and the game's offbeat humour (yes, there's some) survives intact. It's the kind of translation that respects the original's tone rather without sacrificing cultural differences. Of course, no patch can fix the sometimes-confusing objectives that no doubt plagued the original, but it transforms an otherwise impenetrable curiosity into something truly playable.

Ultimately, …They’re Here! isn't exactly a masterpiece, but a pulpy B-movie attempt at J-horror. There's genuine atmosphere haunting the halls that makes this forgotten piece of PlayStation history well worth playing. It might not terrify you in a conventional sense, but it will certainly stay with you longer than you expect. And for that, I give it a glowing recommendation.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses Retroarch with the SwanStation core to emulate the Sony PlayStation. English fan translation by SnowyAria. X-input controllers supported for most games. Manuals for most games included. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 137 Mb. Install Size: 265 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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