Ihatovo Monogatari

Ihatovo Monogatari is an adventure game released for the Super Famicom in 1993, and translated in 2008 by fans. You find yourself in the shoes of an unnamed traveler visiting the small agricultural village of Ihatovo, getting wrapped up in collecting the journals of the famous Real Life author Kenji Miyazawa by engaging in retellings of his fairytale-esque stories.

I say adventure game, but in practice it plays like an RPG with only the town segments. Each chapter will have you talking to every villager in the central town, then visit the area unique to that chapter and talking to everyone there, and then going between the two areas in a more focused manner a few times to solve it. You have an inventory, but pretty much every time you use it is very well broadcasted in the dialogue. There's perhaps a single puzzle that demands more thought than talking to everyone. Sometimes the critical path will get muddled, but talking to everyone is generally the solution (though you'll learn who the hint NPCs are so after the first pass of the chapter there's generally not that much directionless wandering).

 The end result is, well, kind of delightfully meditative. While most of the soundtrack consists of public domain music, the main town theme seems to be original and compliments the chill with a hint of melancholy theme. Time passes between every chapter, so you get to know each of the NPCs over the course of the game and sometimes solutions to the next chapter are hinted upon in the previous (even just discovering which villagers are connected to which when they end up moving around between chapters can be fun) giving everything a connected feel even though the main stars of each chapter are mostly self-contained. You certainly don't want to binge the game since each chapter is very similar to play, but taken a chapter a day makes for the perfect break game. If I had a critique it's probably just a shame that it isn't a different game that goes all-in on making the repeating NPCs the stars of each chapter.

 Should you play Ihatovo Monogatari? If you're exhausted and can't mentally deal with a demanding game but still have an hour a day to burn, then absolutely.