Otogirisou

Otogirisō is a sound novel, a term academic Rebecca Crawford described as being applied to Chunsoft's 20th century visual novel games. It features background graphics as animated illustrations of the narrative as well as background music and sound effects such as doors creaking open, footsteps and screams. Otogirisō has its players advance by reading the in-game text and influencing how the story will proceed by choosing from a list of options that are presented to them at key points in the narrative.

The game keeps track of how many times they have progressed to a narrative ending in the game, and how many choices they have made. Outside of choosing menu options to progress the story, the player can also move backwards and forwards through parts of the story they have already read. After reaching an ending of a narrative, the player can restart the game and unlock more options to choose from during the narrative, leading to new storylines and endings. After seeing all the regular endings, the bookmark on the data selection screen turns pink and allows for a playthrough that contains more meta-jokes and adult-themed options.

The protagonist drives down through a forest road with his girlfriend Nami. She asks about the flowers growing down the road, which the protagonist explains are hypericum, or the "otogirisou". Suddenly the brakes of the car stop working and after an oncoming car rushes by, the protagonist gets the car to come to an emergency stop. Neither Nami or the protagonist are hurt as they leave the car.

They see a flickering light in the distance when a strike of lighting hits a tree crushing their car. As rain falls, Nami and the protagonist follow a trail of flowers following the light they saw earlier and stumble upon a Western-style country mansion.

Chunsoft announced the development of Otogirisou in April 1991. The game was developed at the same time as Dragon Quest V (1992). The game's director Koichi Nakamura had previously been involved with the development of the first three Dragon Quest games, and recalled that he was dating a girl at the time who did not play video games. When she tried playing the games that Nakamura had helped develop, she expressed that she did not really understand the games or what was supposed to be fun about them.

This led to Nakamura thinking he should make a game that he described as "for people who haven't played games before." He thought of older text adventures, ultimately deciding that would be too complicated for a new audience. Programmer Manabu Yamana said prior to the idea of the sound novel, the team attempted a game that would contain elements of Dragon Quest, Sim City (1989), and Populous (1989) which he said "didn't work at all." Kazuya Asano said he recalled that Nakamura told him that he was also inspired by reading a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui in high school that suggested listening to a specific song in the margins of the paper while reading.

Michiko Ishino writing for Hippon Super!  magazine reviewed a pre-release version of Otogirisō. He found the game was good at developing atmosphere, but wished the writing was more carefully crafted. The reviewer opted to not give a customary number grade, explaining that it should not be treated on the same level as other games.

For the original Super Famicom release, the four reviewers in Weekly Famitsu said that Otogirisō will be very divisive and found it difficult to evaluate. Two of the authors found that there may have been too many different stories in the release and two recommending for fans of films and the horror genre. One reviewer included as one of the best releases of the week with the requirement that the player enjoys adventure games. Yutaka Noguchi of Weekly Famitsu later commented on the game, writing that it had simple graphics which made it an "unusually restrained production".

Towards the final quarter of 1992, Otogirisō began appear in other forms of media. This included its music from the game being recorded by the Tokyo Memorial Orchestra and released on compact disc by Warner Music Japan and a radio drama adaptation which was broadcast on Japanese satellite radio on 5 December. On April 10, 1999, a novel of Otogirisō was released by Kadokawa Horror Bunko. It is an original story that only contains similar elements to the original Chunsoft release.

A film adaption of the game titled St. John's Wort was released in Japan on 27 January 2001. It was released in both an English dub and subtitled edition by Asylum Home Entertainment in March 2004. After the release of Otogirisō, a sequel was planned with Nakamura saying the script for the game did not progress very well.