With this small and fine video game it is like in the third stanza of Claudius' "The moon has risen": "Do you see the moon standing there?

/ He is only half visible / and yet he is round and beautiful!

/ That's how some things are, which we confidently laugh at, / because our eyes don't see them."

Axel Weidemann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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"Trek to Yomi", the name already indicates a strenuous journey into the unknown - Yomi is the Japanese realm of the dead - begins conventionally.

Albeit with a formal nod to the Japanese samurai cinema of the '60s and '70s, one could easily mistake it for a stripped-down version of the impressive stealth-and-kill game Ghost of Tsushima.

The video game developer Leonard Menchiari, known for his aesthetically original approaches, sends the player in the character of the young samurai Hiroki through black and white tableaus, which, thanks to their finely tuned lighting, appear like walk-in long shots from films by Daisuke Ito to Akira Kurosawa;

and at the same time like huge stage installations.

"Trek to Yomi" already lovingly captures the lively atmosphere of the village: merchants offer their goods for sale (in Japanese with subtitles), guards drive us out of the granary, but the closer we get to the robbers, the more desperate the villagers become.

Only the showdown against their demonic leader catapults us from the flashback into the actual time of the game: Hiroko has become a strapping lad, in whose hands the sword no longer seems too big.

At the behest of his love Aiko, who runs his village, he rushes to the aid of the neighboring village, which is also plagued by bandits - only to find on his return that he has been lured away from the original target of the attack.

Hiroki's village is on fire, Aiko dies in his arms.

soon he follows her

And suddenly nothing is as you imagined it as a player.

It begins with a village plagued by a mysterious plague that drives people insane.

Again and again, Hiroki comes across strange cocoons, from which dagger-like spider legs protrude, which seek to injure the warrior.

So it's no longer just about revenge, but above all not doing things right.

“Trek to Yomi” changes from Akira Kurosawa's bandit motif to the realm of Masaki Kobayashi, who also directed groundbreaking samurai films (Harakiri, 1962), but also otherworldly things with the film adaptation of Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan.

The way Menchiari and his co-director Marcin Kryszpin manage the transition into the unknown is masterful.

First there are the natural phenomena that accompany the player on his journey, which often leads from left to right across the screen, into the depths of the picture, or out of it: driving rain, the wind, which always serves as an intimation of what could happen in the next tableau refreshes, the whispering of the leaves and the creaking of old trees, wispy fireflies and the full moon, which stands still and cold over burning thatched roofs.

Of course you have to fight too.

And already at the medium difficulty level "Bushido" (if you had just taken "Kabuki"!) in such a way that you start noting down the button combinations as you used to in order to successfully execute roll, sprint or backhand attacks and not just everyone to be promoted to the hereafter by a random Hotzenplotz - that would be an illegal shortcut.

And even if the frustration runs deep because you always fail at the same point, it's difficult to let go of it because you would like to keep fighting your way through the beauty of this elegiac imagery.

"Trek to Yomi" sets standards in terms of video game narrative without any bombast through the camera work, lighting effects, the soundtrack by Yoko Honda and Cody Matthew Johnson, but above all through the changeability of its story.

Trek to Yomi

is available for PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/Series and Windows PC and costs around 20 euros.