Mizuchi

The Ashibuchi valley goes under in April.

You have two hours of light and a work order.
The shrine road is closed to vehicles. You walk from the van.
Photograph the shrine before the water arrives, so the Water Authority can relocate the kami on paper before the valley relocates it in fact. 

The village was relocated in 1994.
Nobody has lived here in thirty years.

The basin at the shrine is full and clear.
The offertory box holds a coin struck four years ago.
The lanterns up the stairway are lit.
And the doors of the main hall are barred, from the inside.

Your camera sees more than you do.

Raise it, frame each structure, take the shot. Then open the photo log and look at what was standing in the frame while you were busy composing.

___________

Features

- A job, not a corridor. Five structures to document. Framing a building means  standing still, facing a wall, with your field of view cut in half.
- A camera that shows you what you missed. The thing on the mountain never appears  in front of you. It appears in your photographs.
- A light you cannot trust. A survey torch on a finite battery, and a brass lighter  that running blows out. You can have light or you can have speed.
- More than one way to leave. Drown on the stairs, or take the cut behind the hall  if you smoked, or if you put back what was not yours. Caught is a checkpoint, not  an ending.
- PS1-era rendering and a degraded tape signal. vertex snapping, affine texture  warping, chroma bleed, tracking roll. Toggleable if you would rather see clearly.
- A wholly synthesised soundscape. Every sound in the game, from the temple bell to  the cicadas that stop, was generated rather than sampled.

Roughly 30 minutes. Meant to be played in one sitting, in the dark, with headphones.

Content warnings

Darkness and low visibility. Sudden loud sounds. Implied death by drowning.
Themes of grief and forced relocation. No gore, no on-screen violence.