Kio's Adventure is an RPG horror game created by Spacelight Studio.
16-year-old high school student Kio is enjoying the last days of her summer vacation before starting her new school by meeting with her friends Illusion and Domini, when all of a sudden, a freak earthquake happens and knocks Kio unconscious. When she wakes up, she finds herself in an ominous alternate world and must navigate puzzles, find items, and fight off deadly monsters in order to survive.
The game is notorious for its graphic and heavily detailed "Game Over" screens and tendency to break the fourth wall.
This game provides examples of:
- Action Survivor: The protagonist is a normal 16-year-old girl.
- Apocalypse How: It isn't exactly made clear what turned the citizens into zombies, but it's clearly an apocalypse situation.
- Back from the Dead: Illusion appears to Kio after her death to give her a map of the area.
- Bittersweet Ending: Kio finds out that she can't escape from the video-game world she's been trapped in, she's stuck there forever and there's nothing she can do about it. But she is able to have the voice at the end bring back her friends, Illusion and Domini.
- Bland-Name Product: Kio meets her friends at "Mcdondon".
- Blood-Spattered Innocents: The avatar of Kio on the player's screen becomes bloody as she loses health.
- Body Horror: Goes without saying.
- Break the Cutie: Kio is exposed to a lot of nasty stuff - her friends being murdered, zombies and monsters chasing after her, creepy survivors preying on her, and she doesn't shy away from expressing her despair.
- Crapsack World: The alternate world Kio is trapped in after the earthquake. After escaping the dungeon, the town she used to know is now inhabited with zombies, destroyed buildings, fallen aircraft, and littered with corpses.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: There are lots of ways for Kio to die, and some of them aren't exactly conventional. We also see a young girl get sawn in half from the torso upwards to give her heart to Kio.
- Dark World: The entirety of the alternate world, but particularly for the dungeon Kio first finds herself in, full of rooms with torture devices and discarded cadavers.
- Deadpan Snarker: Kio is this to Domini and Illusion before the earthquake.
- Eldritch Abomination: The giant worm that Kio must fight towards the end, and the humanoid monstrosity living in the water tank. Also counts for most of the monsters.
- Eye Scream: Happens in one of the "Game Over" screens.
- Girls with Guns: Kio finds an abandoned pistol early on in the game and uses it to defend herself, and later on finds a shotgun.
- Gorn: The gameplay doesn't shy away from showing the explicitness of character deaths, but the "Game Over" screens are particularly graphic, often showing poor Kio mutilated and disemboweled.
- The Many Deaths of You: There are over a dozen different deaths that Kio can suffer throughout the game, from suffocation, to impalement, to decapitation, each with their own unique illustration.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Bobo with his odd fixation on murdering schoolgirls.
- Only Sane Man: Kio, especially with her reactions to some of the characters' dialogue.
- Shout-Out: In the high school, Kio meets a white bunny who tells her he'll lead her to a room with lots of health and ammo. Once she goes into the room, she's ganged upon by an entire fluffle of white rabbits, who eat her.
- Surreal Horror: Nothing really makes sense in the story, and this is whacked up to eleven in the ending.
- Would Harm a Child: This game is out to get Kio, and other minors don't survive for very long. Bobo, a survivor who initially seems like an ally to Kio, later on attempts to murder her.
