Foreword: This article is the English translation of my original essay, written in Traditional Chinese, back in April 2025, roughly one year ago, when all we have about the anime adaptation is a promotion video. I chose to translate the essay into English now since the anime adoption is received quite well (from both people played the game and not played the game), and the Traditional Chinese article have unprecedented access traffic for such a small blog. This will not be a one-to-one translation of the Traditional Chinese version, mostly to streamline the essay and put focus differently for English-speaking audience; I’ll also incorporate some modifications reflecting the change of things within this year and the anime, but bear in mind the timeframe of the original essay is about a year ago, when we just heard of the anime adoption and only have one promotion video. This is a REALLY long essay (my word count plugin says this has almost 13K words) so enjoy!
Also sorry for the site still in Traditional Chinese; I only occationally post English stuff here.
Spoiler note: This essay contains discussion of the whole game, including the True Ending; the anime adoption goes in a rather different direction before converge into the True Ending, so some discussion will be different. I would suggest the reader either finishes the game or finishes the anime before reading this essay to avoid major spoilers.
Last Chinese New Year1 going back home, I prepared the game GNOSIA in my Nintendo Switch as the filler game between family activities. This title is actually sitting in my Steam wishlist for a long time waiting for it to come to PC, but after some consideration I decided to buy the Switch version:
- The genre of this game is known as Mafia or Werewolf, which I am quite familiar with. I was introduced to a genre of anime called “loop fiction” from Higurashi: When They Cry around 2007, then later from the When They Cry community (especially the Umineko fanbase) I was introduced to the Werewolf game. The variant I played the most is the Japanese web version written in PHP, called “汝は人狼なりや？” (Nanji wa jinrou narya?, literally translated as Are you werewolf?, henceforth shortened as Jinro), which I was introduced by this community following Niconico Douga videos featuring the Umineko characters “playing” this game. I’ve been in one of the Traditional Chinese Jinro community ever since, even after some decline when many of the members were too busy IRL and only holding the community together with the in-game chatroom.
- At the end of 2024 an anime adoption of this game is announced, and later revealed it will be on air in October 2025. Because of the familiarity with this genre, I decided to play the game first before anime airs.
- The reason to choose Switch version over PC version is twofold: I recently bought Switch (yes, just before Switch 2 announced), and as some basic info I gathered indicated, this game should be easily picked up and put away; there’s no need to stick before my PC to play. Although I may buy this game again on Steam for the achievements.
Here’s the overall gameplay of GNOSIA: on the first sixteen or so loops, the game gradually introduces to the player all the roles of the game and all 14 characters; in later loops the player will need collect background information of these characters, to find out why they (and Setsu) is trapped in this time loop.
During the research of this essay, I found an interesting record of this game: In Dengeki Indie Game Awards 2022, held by the Japanese column Dengeki Indie from the website Dengeki Online, which is voted by (I think) the readers of the column, GNOSIA had a grand slam of all the first places, even acquired the first four places in the Character Department! If you think the other titles in the overall department are already really good (OMORI in second, DDLC+ in third, ENDER LILIES in fourth), you should definitely try this game.
Continue reading “Memories of Japanese Jinro Game – GNOSIA”