A Look at Mizzurna Falls featuring Tarks Gauntlet

1998 | Human Entertainment | Playstation

Deadly Premonition often gets credited as the first Twin Peaks styled, small, town murder mystery, but little of a decade earlier a little game by the name of Mizzurna Falls, which recently received a fantastic fan translation, graced the PS1 with its awkwardly charming presence. Coming from the mind of Taichi Ishizuka, Mizzurna Falls drops us into the shoes of Matthew Williams, who’s determined to figure out why and how one of his friends went missing.

Being one of the first open world games to grace the home console does come with a set of unique challenges, mostly surrounding how to capture an entire town in real time with the capabilities of the Playstation. This gave Mizzurna Falls a scope that was both incredibly ambitious and unparalleled at the time of its release. The result, however, is a fantastically charming and fleshed out world for players to explore. Mizzurna Falls is a very hands free experience; it’s up to the player to figure out clues towards the mystery by interacting with the inhabitants of the sleepy mountain town, all the while a clock is relentlessly counting down to the demise of your friend, Emma Rowland. It’s one of those games that has the entire town move on a schedule and, while not as detailed as say Shenmue, gives you the ability to really get to know the town and its inhabitants’ habits. The plot itself is linear, however, requiring you to find clues and queues within specific time frames on specific days. If you miss a part of the plot that’s important for the plot as a whole, you’re going to lose sight of it. This is a byproduct of the game releasing at the time that it did, and on the system it did, as the scale of the game drastically exceeded the hardware capabilities of the PS1.

Mizzurna Falls is an incredibly immersive small town simulator with tons of nods to one of my favorite shows, Twin Peaks. My enjoyment of the playthroughs on stream led to me eventually make a video on it, and who better to join me than our resident Lynchian expert, Tarks Gauntlet. Please enjoy the video!