Puzzles are your standard J-horror survival type: sometimes the spirits want an item they've lost, or can be appeased or defeated with an appropriate offering. The map is impressively large and includes areas like a mountaintop park to the north, a closed shopping district and dilapidated factory to the south, and some dense woods to the east where Poro was last spotted. Most of the game revolves around exploring a new section of the map, encountering new spirit types and experimenting with how best to elude them, finding various objects scattered around - some are key, others are collectibles - and eventually locating the missing sister and dog. As well as a flashlight - keeping the light on means you can see more of the spooks, but that also means that they can see you - you can toss out distraction items like coins and rocks, hide in certain environmental fixtures like bushes and signposts, and while you lose stamina quickly by running when scared it's often the best and only way to survive. The player has to stay one step ahead, either by running past or avoiding detection.
The eerie nighttime of the village is home to all sorts of yokai and spirits, most of whom are hostile and will kill the girl whenever they find her. The rest of the game takes place over the same night, as the younger sister looks for clues as to where Poro and her sister have gone, often inadvertently laying various spirits to rest in the process. Her older sister takes off to search for Poro, but after a few hours alone the younger sister decides to find her. The plot of Yomawari is as follows: a young girl is taking her dog Poro home from a walk around dusk, but accidentally lets Poro loose into the woods surrounding their village home. However, it's not a particularly long game nor is it particularly sophisticated in the way AAA games tend to be: I'd put it in the same box as something as Team GrisGris's Corpse Party or Kikiyama's Yume Nikki: 2D sprite-based games with simple interfaces that nonetheless manage to do a lot with so little.
An "Indie" game in the absolute loosest sense, Yomawari was actually developed and published by Nippon Ichi Software - who have made several inroads in the PC gaming marketplace over the past few years with their various strategy RPG ( Disgaea, Phantom Brave) adaptations - and originally released on the Vita. Yomawari: Night Alone is absolutely still that, but while it was a slow burn I found myself enjoying it more as I took the time to figure it out and build up the map a bit. Survival horror is one of those genres I dip into occasionally, partly because it offers a distinctive atmosphere that's a welcome change of pace from all the platformers and RPGs, and partly because I'm curious to see if anyone's innovated on the core mechanics that seem to be the bedrock of almost all survival horror games, which is to be ferried through a circuitous path to look for key items to unlock further progress.