Review: Decollate Decoration Ends Up Being Adorably Dark

When you think KEMCO, the JRPGs the company publishes probably comes to mind. It’s what I think of first, even though I’m well of its more unorthodox titles and adventures. And those are honestly the games from the company we should consider most, since they sometimes end up being extra unusual and interesting. KANEKODO’s Decollate Decoration is the exact type of KEMCO game that should get more attention because, while short, it’s a fascinating horror story. 

Decollate Decoration is an odd horror game with all sorts of layers. It starts out straightforward, but the more endings you unlock and narrative elements you see, the more drastic and unsettling it gets. Your avatar is a high school girl who’s died. She’s outside of an apartment, and realizes that the classmate she loved is inside. However, since he’s alive and she’s dead, there’s not an obvious way to connect. She has 49 days before she’ll move on to the afterlife, but she doesn’t want to go alone. So, she’ll need to find a way to reach (and kill) him so they aren’t separated. 

Decollate Decoration is a visual novel adventure game. Since the heroine can’t directly interact with him and get a response, your options are to curse him, visit his dreams, engage in poltergeist activity, or talk to him, thought there are some other items to interact with at a certain point. Depending on your choices when trying to reach him, you’ll get one of six endings. Some are bad. Others are okay. There’s also a true one. A prologue and epilogue are also available for additional insights. I will admit that I wished there was a little more to getting certain endings, beyond following certain action patterns. It felt like there’s the “idea” of a simulation, but really you only need to select the right actions in the right order, experimenting as you do, in order to work things out. 

So the thing about Decollate Decoration is that it’s an incredibly short game. You can completely beat it and see multiple endings in a little over an hour, since you’re choosing one action per week. Each ending does sort of reveal things about the situation in certain ways. Getting the true end means seeing the epilogue, which shows what the heroine’s final afterlife will entail. Even the bad ends offer different insights into the ghostly girl’s background or what the boy she loved is capable of, and a happy end might not necessarily be happy. It’s never relying on jump scares for the horror elements, but rather leaning in to unsettling elements of human nature and desperation.

The design direction and sprite-based art used for Decollate Decoration is effective in encouraging eerie interpretations of characters and elements around them. There are references to gruesome things. Specifically related to corpses and death, as you might imagine from this type of game. going with a mostly monochromatic color palette with shades of red and pink really helps with enhancing everything happening on-screen. Since the ghostly girl does come across as the most passionate and vibrant entity, it helps that others like the boy aren’t accentuated in that same fashion. But it also imparts an otherworldly nature and makes her stand out in a way I appreciate.

Decollate Decoration exemplifies the idea of style and substance, though it isn’t the most meaty horror story. It tells its tale in a brief, effective manner. That’s coupled with some lovely pixel art that uses effective color choices. KANEKODO’s tale is quite short, however, and people might want more interactions or details out of their unsettling stories. I appreciated 

Decollate Decoration is available for PCs.