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The story
A thread popped up to discuss the Super Famicom mystery-suspense adventure game “Kamaitachi no Yoru” (Banshee’s Last Cry). Nostalgic stories poured in — from the classic first-playthrough experience of getting stabbed to death with a ski pole by the heroine Mari, to bragging rights from players who nailed the culprit on their very first try, to posts from people who’d actually stayed at Pension Knulp, the real-life inn that inspired the game’s setting.
What people said
You mean the heroine, right?
Most people's first playthrough goes: fight off the three girls after they attack you, then get stabbed to death by the heroine with the ski pole.
I actually got it right because I'd properly read shin honkaku (new orthodox-style) mystery novels.
I'd also read other work by Abiko Takemaru — the game's actual author — like '8 no Satsujin' and the Marifu one.
By process of elimination, there's really only one answer it can be.
That's the culprit from the Famicom game 'Portopia Serial Murder Case.'
2: masterpiece
3: decent
Shin (the 'true' sequel): garbage
That's my mental image of the series
If you only count the main story, 2 could be called a masterpiece, but they padded it out with so many filler endings it drops down to just 'decent.'
I know I'll get flak for this, but
I like 'Kuro no Jūsan' (Black Thirteen).
That bloody hand was so scary.
Is the flowchart just built that way?
Or is the ski-pole stabbing basically a twisted reversal of wanting to stab Mari?
Yeah, that's just how the flowchart's built.
Getting stabbed by Mari is basically always a bad ending.
At the start, the branch points haven't been unlocked yet.
That doorbell is terrifying. I think it happens right after you find a few new bodies too.
I've actually been there.
It was moving how exactly like the game it is, but there's nothing to do there, so I just spent the whole time reading 'Gaku' (a mountaineering manga).
Apparently it only has the main story, lol.
Kind of like Steins;Gate, huh.
I used to swap out Tooru and Mari's names for my own name and whatever girl I had a crush on at the time.
It's literally just a blue blob, so why did it feel so sexy?
Because it wouldn't sell.
That 'Huh?' sound effect (that little jingle)
followed by the cave-like BGM was terrifying.
Just remembering it gives me goosebumps.
2 is less scary and more just unsettling.
Right after you expose the true culprit, solve every mystery, restrain them, and go 'phew, glad that's over' — bang, right after that.
Early on it asks something like 'Did you play Kamaitachi no Yoru?' and for some reason I answered yes.
Then it asked something like 'Do you remember who the culprit was?' and I panicked — 'Uh… what do I do… guess I'll just type in some random character name from the manual' — so with zero clue I typed in 'Mikimoto,' and it replied with something like 'Oh, so you DO remember!'
Somehow I ended up spoiling the twist for myself, by myself.
Nobody asked, buddy.
Background and Key Points
Kamaitachi no Yoru (1994) was the second entry in Chunsoft’s “Sound Novel” series, a text-and-still-image genre the studio pioneered with Otogirisou two years earlier: no voice acting, just print-style prose set to sound effects and music, with the story branching into dozens of endings depending on player choices. Its author, Abiko Takemaru, was already an established shin honkaku (“new orthodox”) mystery novelist, which is why some posters treat correctly guessing the killer as a sign of genre literacy rather than luck. The game’s snowbound pension setting is modeled on Pension Knulp, a real Western-style guesthouse in Hakuba, Nagano, that still operates today and that at least one poster in the thread has actually stayed at. The series continued with Kamaitachi no Yoru 2 (2002) and a further sequel subtitled “Shin” (Rinne, 2008), both weighed in the thread’s informal ranking of the franchise.
The thread doesn’t split over whether the original is good — almost no one disputes that — but over how much of its reputation still holds up on replay: some dismiss it as a text-mashing relic propped up by nostalgia, while others argue the scares and prose land specifically because of, not despite, the Super Famicom’s limited graphics, which forced the game to render Mari only as an unidentifiable blue silhouette.
One likely point of confusion for outside readers: post #13’s “the culprit is Yasu” meme has nothing to do with this game. Yasu comes from Portopia Serial Murder Case (1985), an earlier Yuji Horii mystery adventure that predates Kamaitachi and shares no story connection to it beyond genre and, eventually, publisher — a mix-up the thread itself corrects.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyō G) thread “That Game Called Kamaitachi no Yoru.”
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