.You've just been sent into a school building as part of some sort of punishment. The conditions are simple: Explore the building for a bit. Should seem simple enough, right?
However, someone's in the building with you. And it seems they have homicidal intent planned.
Aka Manto contains examples of:
- Action Survivor: The good ending invokes picking up the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi deep within the school grounds after making the proper offerings to its shrine, and running Aka Manto through with it.
- Air-Vent Passageway: You can move about in the air ducts around the school, which is helpful for avoiding the Aka Manto as it cannot chase you through them. Just watch out for the giant centipede.
- Animesque: The two fellow female students, Maiko and Haruna, that force you into exploring the abandoned school look like this (Haruna in particular bears a striking resemblance to Ayano Aishi/Yandere-chan), which contrasts with the entire rest of the game having more of a realistic style, at least within its Retraux graphics.
- Antagonist Title: The game is named after the enemy.
- Apocalyptic Log: Tape recorders can be found throughout the school that play tapes when interacted with. Namely, they reveal that the Aka Manto behind the murders used to be a male student named Atsushi.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: The centipede in the vents is HUGE. There are also spiders that will immobilize you and repeatedly bite you until you shrug them off or kill them with the bugkiller.
- Bleed 'Em and Weep: While killing the Aka Manto in the good ending is an awesome moment and the bastard had it coming, the protagonist is still an ordinary schoolgirl, and gets serious jitters over having actually killed someone, running out of the school as fast as she can.
- But Thou Must!: You must pick up the red paper on the door with graffiti in the bathroom asking you "Red Paper? Blue Paper?" to obtain the key to progress, which makes the Aka Manto aware of your presence in the school.
- Cobwebs of Disuse: The inside of the school has quite a few cobwebs in it.
- Continuing is Painful: Dying pushes you back to the very beginning of the game, forcing you to do it all over again.
- Cool Sword: The Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, a sword sealed within a shrine at the school that can be unsealed by offering all of the rainbow colored papers. It is the key to getting the good ending and can kill the Aka Manto in a single stab.
- Creepy Centipedes: A pretty big centipede is crawling around in the school's air vents.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Why are you being "punished" by Maiko and Haruna into exploring a place associated with mysterious deaths and missing girls all over? A single throwaway line implies you got too close to Maiko's boyfriend for her comfort.Maiko: (This is what you get for getting too close to him...)
- Earn Your Happy Ending: After helping Nagisa, you could end the game right then and there by escaping from the rooftop, but this leads to the bad ending. To obtain the good ending, you have to collect all of the colored papers to unseal the shrine to resolve the threat permanently. Notably, this is one of the few games by Chilla's Art to have a mostly positive good ending, with the protagonist's life intact.
- Friendly Ghost: Nagisa, who unlocks the gate to the rooftop after giving her some bread and milk. Additionally, there is also the spirit in the old well, who helps you collect the rainbow papers needed to unseal the shrine.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The actual Aka Manto, as heavily implied by the Apocalyptic Log, who killed Atsushi in line with its urban legend and transformed him into another Aka Manto.
- Hell Is That Noise: Being spotted by the Aka Manto results in it screaming as it chases after you, while a cacophony of a rushing heartbeat and instruments play to emphasize running like hell or being stabbed to death.
- In the Hood: The Aka Manto wears a big red hooded cloak that covers its body.
- The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: After obtaining the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi in the good ending route, this time you hunt the Aka Manto down and kill the bastard once and for all.
- Multiple Endings: The game has a good and bad ending.
- Good Ending - Aka Manto Killed: The protagonist slays the Aka Manto with the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, putting an end to the string of murders connected to the abandoned school, albeit she does question as to whether the things she experienced were truly real. Notably one of the few rare positive endings from a Chilla's Art game with very few bittersweet implications.
- Bad Ending - Escaped: The protagonist successfully flees the school from the rooftop, but with the Aka Manto still at large, the murders will only continue.
- Notice This: Items that you can pick up have a red aura.
- One-Winged Angel: Later in the game, the Aka Manto gets angry that the protagonist continues to evade it and lets out a bloodcurdling roar, gaining a more disturbing appearance with wide Black Eyes of Crazy, a darker red cloak, and a deeper, more demonic scream when it spots you. It also becomes much more persistent when it chases after you.
- Psycho Knife Nut: Instead of the more gruesome deaths that it inflicts in the urban legend, the Aka Manto here opts to stab you to death with a knife as it chases you. This is a hint that this may not be the actual Aka Manto, and that it Was Once a Man.
- Retraux: The game uses 3D graphics, but has very low-resolution textures, presumably in order to emulate classic horror games from the original PlayStation. However, while other Retraux horrors going for the same aesthetic have also emulated the third-person perspective with fixed camera angles (i.e., Back in 1995), this game is still played in first person, like the much more modern Amnesia: The Dark Descent-style horror games.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The bad ending is managing to get the right conditions together to escape the school from the rooftop, but ultimately this means there's no resolution to Aka Manto and more people will inevitably die if they go near its haunting grounds.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: When Aka Manto spots you or is nearby, the screen fills up with Japanese text telling you to flee, and in both endings, with no proof of the Aka Manto remaining whether it lives or dies, it's questionable if the protagonist even actually met the entity or the whole haunting was something more psychological.
- Took a Level in Badass: After the protagonist obtains the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi in the good ending route, she hunts the Aka Manto down and slays it by impaling it with the sword.
- Was Once a Man: The implications of the Apocalyptic Log throughout the game is that a new student of the school that was bullied, Atsushi, ended up dead under mysterious circumstances matching Aka Manto murders, and then transformed into an Aka Manto and racked up a high enough body count to force the place to close down, leaving him haunting it.
- White Mask of Doom: Sometimes, there are creepy floating white masks that follow the direction you're going. You need to get away from them immediately, as they alert the Aka Manto to your location.
