Tokyo Dark: Remembrance doesn't need a mystery

Tokyo Dark: Remembrance (2019) is a detective game without a mystery. Your character, Ito Ayami, searches for clues in abandoned buildings, interrogates odd and isolated individuals, and often operates outside the legal system - but there is no grand conspiracy or plot. All the pieces are not only in play but plainly visible from nearly the opening scene of the game, and what reveals there are later on are soft and tertiary to the main narrative. Tokyo Dark is structurally odd, but none of this is a criticism, in fact its atypical storytelling is frequently intriguing and successful. That is, until the game decides against itself.

Before diverging into more ambiguous half-statements, here is a brief synopsis of Tokyo Dark as it can be understood at the start of the game (so don't worry, these barely classify as spoilers). Police detective Ito Ayama is suffering PTSD from a botched hostage negotiation. Ostracized by her department and experiencing frequent traumatizing flashbacks, she is thrown into further disorder when her partner is kidnapped. Despite her judgement she takes on the case herself, only to witness her partner's murder at the hands of Reina, the girl she murdered in the hostage negotiation months before. Unable to prove Reina's existence, Ayami is put on suspension and must find her own answers.

Screenshot courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment.

These beats are the closest Tokyo Dark comes to drawing an actual mystery, but it's all misdirection. Tokyo Dark is as interested in the particulars of its plot as Lost (2004) cared about numbers and polar bears. Elements of a who-dun-it exist around the game's periphery, but it is the character drama - particularly Ayami's struggles with mental health and institutional sexism - which give Tokyo Dark substance.

Like most modern crime drama's, Tokyo Dark gets into the weeds almost immediately, incorporating sex trafficting, abuse of power, and rampant harassment into its world immediately upon Ayami stepping off the Tokyo metro. This world is grungy and hostile, explicitly designed to upset and appall the player, and surprisingly it mostly succeeds early on at cashing these checks.

In one of Ayami's earliest encounters she meets a hostess at a sketchy bar flirting with a squat, greasy man who is being not at all subtle about his intentions. When Ayami attempts to question the hostess she is brushed off due to her status as a cop, and the disdain she displays for the hostess's profession. Though designed to be choice driven, Tokyo Dark does not bend easily to the desires of it player and scenes like these are among its best due to how well they succeed at calling the player on their bullshit. Yes, you're a cop, but that doesn't mean people have to talk to you, and it definitely doesn't mean you can slut shame strangers and still walk away with the clues you need to continue. It's refreshingly bold within a genre which often by design allows players to engage in any manner of debauchery without punishment.

Other touches are subtler but lend a degree of care to the sensitive subjects the game gorges upon, such as learning about Ayami's different coping mechanisms as you explore her apartment. Tokyo Dark is a game about trauma and reconciliation, so something as mundane as petting a cat or remembering to take your medication highlight the ordinary routines necessary for survivors to move on.

But then the other foot falls, not entirely upon the game but close enough to give it a solid crack straight down the middle. The sensitivity of early traumatic scenes is discarded for rapid fire exploitation and melancholy. Ayami's mental health becomes functionally irrelevant once it is attached to a meaningless and shallow stat system, and depending on your reading of the game’s conclusion her anxiety was possibly never a factor at all. The empathy given to marginalized characters initially is replaced by Ayami's unprompted pep talks, which turn out to be, miraculously, just enough to get people out of their situation and into some unknown “better life.” Perhaps most frustratingly Tokyo Dark often inflicts tonal whiplash in order to integrate inane anime clichés into an otherwise oppressively dark plot (the biggest offender are the scenes of Ayami having transcendent food experiences, which are exactly what you expect).

Tokyo Dark is so bizarre and mangled that it is difficult to pin down where it falls off the rails. It can be both deftly thoughtful and entirely distasteful within the same scene, as if two different games were stapled together and forced to fight to the death. It is neither mystery nor character study nor anime cheesefest, and yet it is somehow all of these. How it begins so intelligently and then transforms into something inscrutable is the real mystery at hand.

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Tokyo Dark: Remembrance was reviewed on the Nintendo Switch using a code provided by the developer. It is available on the Nintendo eShop.