Walk (or its original title 散歩, pronounced Sanpo) is Japanese stealth horror game made in March 2021. Released as part of the Haunted Playstation 1 Demo Disk, you play as a schoolgirl as she makes her way home through the streets of a city which is completely deserted, save for you and a shadowy entity that stalks around and tries to catch you. To survive, you must sneak around the streets and collect useful items that will help you make your way home in one piece.
The most notable thing fans of Walk will point out as a creative highlight is the fixed camera angles taking the position of security cameras, which create a unique Found Footage aspect to the story, and limit your ability to navigate the streets—as well as hide from the monster.
The game is currently in demo mode and is very short. It can be downloaded here.
Due to this game's short nature, spoilers unrelated to the bonus stage are left unmarked. Proceed at your own caution!
- Action Survivor: The player character. She is presumably a little girl of around kindergarten age, if her uniform is meant to be taken as any indication, and she constantly needs to trick and outsmart the monster chasing her.
- Ambiguous Situation: Why the town is completely abandoned and the only remaining inhabitants are a child and a monster is never explained. Where the monster came from is also not explained. Even stranger is that the girl you play as presumably just got out of school, meaning it wasn't like this at some point.
- Conveniently an Orphan: Possibly the case with the player. The whole goal of the game is to avoid getting killed and make it home, but once you do, no parents of the player character are shown and their house (which consists of a television, a bed, a tv and a porch) are way too small to hold more than one person. If she did have parents, they might be dead or out of the picture.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Many commentators point out that the monster could symbolize a child predator or human trafficker stalking their next victim. Given how Japan has a noteworthy stalking problem, this could very well be the case.
- Double-Meaning Title: "Sanpo" is Japanese for "walk" But it can also be the Japanese writing of "Sampo," an artifact in Finnish Mythology that is alluded to in the bonus stage.
- Downer Ending: The schoolgirl makes it home, only to step out of the house for a few seconds before the monster rushes her.
- Found Footage: The game takes advantage of having the camera be positioned at a fixed point in a given scene, with a third-person perspective of both the player and the monster. This can have some advantages or disadvantages depending on the angle; sometimes you can see the monster before it sees the player, and sometimes its the opposite. The game stays in this style until the final stretch where it switches to the monster's perspective.
- Gory Discretion Shot: We never actually see how the monster kills the girl when you get a Game Over. The only real hint of an idea that we get is her screaming and the monster crowing.
- Humanoid Abomination: The monster has a human-like form, but its body is entirely black with no shadows or reflection of light, it causes the camera to glitch out when it's onscreen, its "hair" is indistinguishable from the rest of its body, and it has a pale mask/face that's fixed into a grimace. Whatever this thing is, it's not a human.
- Nothing Is Scarier: When you die, the monster transforms and grows massive black wings that obscure the audience's view of the player character, so we don't see exactly what it does to her or how she dies. This also applies to when it catches her as she's hiding.
- Mind Screw: The game has it's strange moments. For one thing, the key to a locked gate is in a bottle of juice inside a vending machine. There is also the random fish that is dropped from above the camera's view that is still alive and flopping on the ground.
- Polygonal Graphics: The game is rendered with polygonal graphics for the moving characters (The player, the monster, the fish, and the crows) while the backgrounds are real photos with a lower pixel count to blend the two styles properly.
- Survival Horror: The entity chasing you cannot be fought against, and the player's only true options are to run and hide.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: In the hidden level, you are suddenly a grown Finnish man wandering the woods, reaching a tower that you try to scale, before the monster arrives and kills you.
- Yōkai: The monster appears to be a Tengu, a type of Japanese crow-demon. This would explain the crows seen flying around the town, and the feathers and claws the monster has. The monster also grows black bird wings and crows like a bird when it manages to kill you.
- Possibly averted, the bonus chapter implies her to be none other than Louhi, the flying witch and the antagonist in The Kalevala.
