Ib

Ib is a single-player adventure horror game. Players control Ib, the title character of the game, from a top-down perspective as she navigates and tries to escape a surreal art gallery. The gameplay consists of examining and interacting with objects in the world, collecting items, and solving puzzles. There are enemies, but no combat.

Instead of fighting, players must evade enemies by escaping into other sections of the gallery. Getting caught depletes the player character's health, represented in the form of petals of a red rose. Once health reaches zero, the player loses.

A young girl, Ib, is visiting an art gallery with her parents. While examining a strange painting, a sudden power outage ensues, the gallery's doors lock, and other visitors disappear. Guided by a trail of paint splatters, she is lured inside another painting and finds herself within a surreal painting-like "fabricated world". Making her way through the otherworldly realm, she comes across a collapsed figure on the ground.

After successfully reviving him, the figure introduces himself as Garry. Like her, he is also trapped inside the gallery, and the two resolve to escape together.

Ib was created by kouri, a Japanese indie game developer of whom little is known. It was developed using the RPG Maker 2000 game engine and initially self-published in February 2012 as freeware, available for download from the developer's personal website. Updates continued until June 2014, culminating in the release of the final version 1.07. Ib was kouri's first experience in game development; he chose an art gallery as the setting because he thought it would be an easy one and horror as a genre because he, mistakenly, thought he would never get tired of it.

In November 2019, development started on a remake of the original game. According to the developer, this was due to popular demand, particularly from outside Japan, and a desire to update the game to conform with modern hardware standards. Created with the RPG Maker MV engine, the remake features updated graphics, gameplay mechanics, and a remastered soundtrack. Unlike its predecessor, the remake is not free and was instead published by Playism for Windows via Steam on 11 April 2022 and Nintendo Switch on 9 March 2023.

Ib quickly became popular after its release, accumulating over a million downloads in Japan and a similar number internationally after receiving an English translation. The remake received "generally favorable reviews", according to the review aggregator website Metacritic, which calculated a weighted average rating of 82/100 for the Nintendo Switch version based on 11 critic reviews. Aggregator OpenCritic found that 89% of 10 critics recommended the remake.

Critics identified the game's atmosphere as its main appeal. Joe DeVader of Nintendo World Report called it "genuinely creepy and off-putting", commending the use of silence and sudden sounds to catch players off guard. RPGFan's Des Miller saw clear inspiration taken from Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland while finding the world much "darker, claustrophobic, and deadly" than the one Alice found herself in. Famitsu, on the other hand, found the atmosphere "cute yet eerie"; chilling but not overly frightening.

Ib has been described as a cult classic and an influential title among indie horror adventure games, influencing games such as The Witch's House and Omori. Various pieces of merchandise have also been made.