Tag: horror games

Tales of the Black Forest

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Tales of the Black Forest
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1093910/Tales_of_the_Black_Forest/

Tales of the Black Forest is a 16-bit RPG Maker narrative adventure game whose tone is split evenly between wholesome cuteness and graphic horror. Although Tales of the Black Forest features a dozen simple puzzles, a few short chase sequences, and limited elements of exploration, it might be more accurate to call it a visual novel instead of a classic adventure game. Tales of the Black Forest takes about three and a half hours to play, and more than half of this time is spent reading character dialog as you progress through a linear story.

The game’s story follows a high school student named Kihara Kashin who wakes up on a bench outside an abandoned train station. Kihara has somehow been transported to a depopulated town called Kuromori (whose name means “black forest”), where she used to live as a child before her mother died in a car accident. Inside the derelict station, Kihara meets a mysterious shape-shifting woman named Kiritani Yuki, who tells her that she has been trapped in the ruins of Kuromori by a curse. The only way to escape Kuromori is to use Nensha, a magical power that allows Kihara to travel back in time by touching retro electronic devices. By going back to the 1990s with Kiritani as her guide, Kihara can learn the origin of the curse and hopefully break it. 

The overall story arc of Tales of the Black Forest admittedly doesn’t make much sense. Thankfully, the game is split into three distinct chapters, each of which showcases the stand-alone character story of a cute yōkai girl while allowing the player to explore her environment. Each of the three chapters also explores the intersection between an urban legend and a social issue of the 1990s.

The first chapter is about a deserted village, Shiranaki (a play on the urban legend of Inunaki Village), and rural depopulation. The second chapter is about a magical ghost train and a fictional version of the Aum Shinrikyō “new religious movement” that carried out the Tokyo Subway Sarin Gas Attacks in March 1995. The third chapter is about a haunted movie theater that serves as a case study for how many small businesses that thrived during the postwar Shōwa era were forced to close during the prolonged economic recession of the 1990s.

Along with urban legends and social issues, Tales of the Black Forest is strongly inspired by the movies of Studio Ghibli, and its magical world is filled with quirky yōkai and gentle kami. The character illustrations of cute girls that accompany the dialog text are somewhat generic, but the game’s developers clearly put a great deal of love and attention into the 16-bit character sprites and their environments. There’s not a single part of this game that doesn’t make a gorgeous screenshot.

Alongside its whimsy and beauty, however, Tales of the Black Forest contains serious and sometimes graphically violent scenarios with disturbing themes and imagery. The overall tone of the game’s story emphasizes character drama more than horror, but the gruesome and upsetting elements are still there. You’ll be talking to adorable cats in the beautiful green yard of a forest café, and fifteen minutes later you’ll be watching a young woman beaten to death by a deranged cultist.

This mix of wholesome and horror worked for me, but both tonal aspects of the story are equally prominent. Accordingly, I wouldn’t recommend Black Forest to anyone who can’t sit through the creepier moments of The Ring, nor would I recommend it to anyone who can’t tolerate the more sentimental moments of My Neighbor Totoro.

Tales of the Black Forest was made by a Chinese studio in an obvious homage to Japanese popular culture, and its story occasionally feels like an attempt to filter a lecture from an “Introduction to Contemporary Japanese Society” university course through the medium of fiction. I personally found the references to Japanese social problems of the 1990s to be interesting and well-intentioned, but I could understand that some players might find these elements of the story a bit cringe in the way that early 2000s “onigiri means rice ball desu” North American anime fandom was a bit cringe.

Tales of the Black Forest was originally written in Chinese, and the English translation feels as though it was created by someone without much experience in localization. It’s serviceable, but it can be awkward at times. I tend to think the concept of “standard English” is nonsense, and I found the translation to be charming, especially because it reminded me of how pirated anime used to have English subtitles created by people whose first language was Chinese. In keeping with the retro theme of the game, I very much appreciated this unintentional element of nostalgia.

Tales of the Black Forest isn’t perfect, but it’s a solid 7/10 game that’s elevated to an 8/10 by virtue of the love and care that the two-person development team put into every aspect of its creation. This game caters to Japanese pop culture nerds who are fans of both cute anime characters and creepy urban legends, and I’m surprised it hasn’t attracted more attention since it was released on Steam in 2019. Tales of the Black Forest is a small but shining hidden treasure.

NextDoor

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NextDoor
https://broelbrak.itch.io/nextdoor

NextDoor is a spooky 2D interactive story game based on one of Junji Itō’s short horror manga. It’s free to download or play in your browser, and it takes about ten to fifteen minutes to read.

You play as a college student living in a rundown apartment building. The student is unable to concentrate because of the loud music blaring in the apartment above hers, so she finally snaps and goes to complain. The upstairs tenant is an asshole who refuses to turn down his stereo because his next-door neighbor has never said a word to him about the noise. If you can convince his neighbor to complain, the manchild gripes, perhaps he might listen to what you have to say.

The problem is that the next-door neighbors are decidedly unfriendly. Another tenant in the building says that there’s actually a group of women in that apartment, but they’re very quiet, and no one has ever spoken with them. Perhaps it’s not the best idea to attract their attention…

Despite its limited scope, the environment design of NextDoor is nicely done and more than sufficiently creepy. Ironically, the music is quite good, and the sound design is better. The character animations are a pleasure to watch, especially when the player gets to see more of the mysterious next-door neighbor.

“The Lady Next Door” is from Junji Itō’s collection Mimi’s Tales of Terror, and it’s a fun play on a category of Japanese urban legends that take the form of “here’s some weird shit I saw in a Shōwa-era (built before the 1990s) apartment building.” Itō transforms the tropes of these non sequitur “weird shit I saw” stories into a cautionary tale, and it’s delightfully cathartic to witness the unnecessarily harsh punishment of the transgressor. Because seriously, fuck that guy.

NextDoor’s adaptation of this manga is interesting in that it configures the college student as the transgressor. By association, you the player are the transgressor as well, and it’s fun to push the college student forward into increasingly bad decisions. She doesn’t die, but she most definitely sees some weird shit.

There’s one (very mild) jumpscare in the game, and it’s a cameo from my favorite Junji Itō manga, Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu. Yon & Mu is exactly what you would expect from a cute autobio pet manga drawn by Junji Itō, and it’s marvelous. It’s always a pleasure to have an unexpected encounter with one of these adorable hellbeasts.

Last Train Home

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Last Train Home
https://hby.itch.io/last-train-home

Last Train Home is a short and spooky creepypasta story game. It’s free to play in your browser, and it takes about five minutes to complete. You play as a salaryman who finds himself on a near-deserted commuter train in the dead of night.

The first half of the game is set in three train cars and the two walkways between them, each of which is occupied. With the doors at either end locked, you move between the three cars and talk with their occupants, befriending them by completing small tasks.

This is all well and good until the lights go off, at which point you’re left to fend for yourself in the darkness with nothing more than a cigarette lighter and the eerie flashes from outside the windows to illuminate your path forward. Where is this train going, and how do you get off?

Just as the United States is home to countless urban legends surrounding cars, from vanishing hitchhikers to cursed highway rest areas, there are all sorts of urban legends about commuter trains in Japan and South Korea. “The last train” is a common motif in cautionary tales warning midnight passengers against accidentally boarding the wrong train or even, heaven forbid, falling asleep and missing your stop as the train continues hurtling into the night.

In contrast to the pristine coziness of trains in East Asia, there’s a New York style grunginess to the cars in Last Train Home that renders the environment unsettling and uncanny. The lighting and sound design are nicely creepy as well. There’s not a lot of text, but each line manages to be subtly unpleasant. There are no jumpscares, just a pervasive atmosphere of creeping dread. The catharsis at the end of the story is lovely, but you’ll definitely have second thoughts about running to catch the last train after playing this game. 

A Man Outside

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A Man Outside
https://litrouke.itch.io/a-man-outside

A Man Outside is a short vocabulary quiz game. This twist is that, while you play, a creepy shadow man watches you from outside your bedroom window. You’re tasked with doing three sets of ten vocab cards as spooky ambient sounds play in the background, and you can look out of the window at any time to see if the man has gotten closer. Between quiz sets, you can text a friend to update them on the situation.

I hope it doesn’t spoil this game to say that there are no jumpscares. The vocabulary gets progressively creepier, though, and there are fun distortions in the quiz interface. The vocab game itself is quite good, even without the added attraction of the creepy man. Necrophagy is my new favorite word.

Based on what I’ve seen in YouTube playthroughs, your vocab score doesn’t matter, and the choices you make in the text conversations simply add a bit of extra flavor. In order to get the true ending of the game, you have to play it from start to finish three times. There are three different vocab difficulty levels, so I suppose that adds a bit of replay value. Each run only takes about seven or eight minutes, but I don’t think the second or third ending is anything special. The alternate endings are nice bonuses for vocab flash card enthusiasts who want to try every difficulty level, but the first ending is perfect.

As an aside, as someone with ADHD, I often have to pretend that someone is watching me in order to get past executive dysfunction. I used to “have someone watch me” by going to coffee shops, but that only worked in Tokyo and Washington DC, which are beautiful and walkable and filled with cafés. Philadelphia has many charms, but it’s not that sort of city. Now, if I’m having trouble sending emails or whatever, I have to conjure an amorphous imaginary person who’s sitting in the room with me just out of eyesight like some sort of sleep paralysis demon.

So, for me, playing A Man Outside was kind of comforting. Cozy, even. Honestly, this might actually be a decent way to study vocab.

One Hell of a Maid

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One Hell of a Maid
https://bun-tired.itch.io/one-hell-of-a-maid

One Hell of a Maid is a free, ten-minute RPG Maker horror game about a young man who has been dispatched on his first assignment for an at-home maid service. Unfortunately, the apartment he’s been contracted to clean belongs to a group of cultists. Using a handy set of cleaning tools, you follow the handsome maid as he cleanses the apartment of blood on the floor, eldritch horrors in the bathtub, and coffee stains on the couch.

The apartment has three rooms, and each of them has a (very) mild jumpscare. I love the monster design, and I also love the poor maid’s no-nonsense attitude regarding the horrors he encounters. This was the only job he could get, apparently, so he might as well do it. It’s unclear why he has to wear a frilly maid’s outfit, but it’s probably best not to think about that too hard. 

The ending of the game is very sweet. When the cultists finally come home, they are adorable. The gameplay in One Hell of a Maid is minimal, but the art and writing do a lot of heavy lifting. Just like the maid himself, bless his heart.

One Hell of a Maid is not for everyone, but…

Actually who am I kidding. The appeal of this game is universal. What a fun and tasty snack.

Rental

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Rental
https://smarto-club.itch.io/rental

With the spooky season upon us, Smarto Club decided to take a break from being wholesome and turned spooky with Rental, an eerie game about the risks of renting beach houses.

Rental is a 32-bit game about a family of cute bunnies who rent a vacation house in the woods. This isn’t a horror game, necessarily, but it’s strange and lowkey creepy. It takes about fifteen minutes to finish, although it might take slightly longer for people who are out of practice with PlayStation One style 3D spatial navigation.

As the daughter of the bunny family, your job is to walk through the house and collect objects. The twist is that there are House of Leaves shenanigans going on. The first half of the game takes place aboveground, while the second half is more of an adventure. There’s a shadow monster in the house with you, but its appearance seems to be random. I only saw it once, briefly, during my second playthrough, and it wasn’t a big deal. Rental is much more atmospheric than scary, and most of the atmosphere has to do with the ambient music and the oddness of the scenario.

Rental works well as analog horror. The graphics and gameplay and washed-out colors feel super outdated, as do the Hello Kitty character designs. There’s also the combination of the nostalgic childhood experience of going on vacation with the childhood discomfort of trying to settle into an unknown place. The house you’re exploring has a standard layout and floorplan, and the girl often comments on how normal and unremarkable everything is, which adds to the sense of the uncanny.

The Christian religious icons the girl has to gather are also totally normal. For me, this created an extra layer of resonance in the sense of going to a mundane place with a lot of Christian art and imagery and feeling that everything is slightly weird about the oddly suffering men and oddly beatific women and oddly mature babies. I appreciate the girl’s no-nonsense attitude toward everything in the house, which makes the ending all the more amusing.

There are no jumpscares in this game, and it’s not challenging. Rental is a simple but spooky fifteen-minute treat for connoisseurs of perfectly normal houses that are ever so slightly larger on the inside.

Inside

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Inside is a 2.5D puzzle platformer originally released for the Xbox One in 2016. The near-future dystopian sci-fi setting contains strong elements of horror, and players should expect to experience numerous violent deaths. The game takes about four hours to finish, although a longer completionist run that involves accessing hidden areas will be rewarded with a secret ending.

You play as a ten-year-old boy, and you begin the game alone in the woods. The boy has presumably escaped from a shadowy research facility, and he’s being chased by dogs and men with guns. The boy will be killed if he’s spotted, so the player’s initial goal is to move to the right side of the screen while evading capture.

After the boy escapes from the woods, he emerges onto a farm littered with the carcasses of parasite-infested pigs. It’s here that the game introduces its central puzzle mechanic, which involves using a headset to control the mindless bodies of adult humans. When the boy makes his way out the farm and into a decaying city, it becomes clear that these mindless bodies were once marketed to the general population before the apparent collapse of human civilization.

Inside eventually finds its stride, but the puzzles at the beginning of the game have the potential to be frustrating for a first-time player. In order to progress through one of the barns on the farm, for example, the player has to backtrack to the left in order to open the barn’s back door. Opening this door allows a gaggle of chirping chicks to enter the barn.

The game has never previously asked the player to move from right to left, and there’s no indication that the chicks exist other than a faint chirping on the other side of the barn’s back door. It’s therefore not immediately apparent that these chicks are a necessary element to solving a puzzle that already has half a dozen moving parts. The game becomes much better about broadcasting puzzle solutions as it progresses, but it might be necessary to consult a walkthrough at the beginning.

The first quarter of the game also features another type of frustrating puzzle that involves crossing long distances to escape from attack dogs. If the boy dies at any point during one of these sequences, the player has to start over at the beginning, thereby losing up to six or seven minutes of progress. Repeatedly playing through one of these sequences only to fail at the end isn’t fun.

Thankfully, Inside becomes much better at managing respawn points after the boy leaves the farm. Many of the game’s later puzzles involve a combination of careful timing and brutal death, but they allow the player adequate space to stand still and assess the situation.

Tiny birds and bloodthirsty canines aside, Inside is visually striking from start to finish. The sound design is brilliant, and the audio works alongside the graphic design to create a palpable sense of danger and menace. Unlike Playdead’s earlier game Limbo (2010), which was more abstract and fantasy-themed, Inside is grittier and more focused on portraying a disturbingly realistic apocalypse.

As I played Inside, I could envision its story evolving in two ways. My first theory was that the boy is a host for the same parasite that killed the pigs on the farm; and, if he escapes into civilization, the infection will spread and the world will be doomed. My second theory was that the boy is being controlled just as he controls the mindless bodies; and, after he accomplishes his mission, he will be unplugged.

The actual endgame story developments are nothing even remotely resembling what I expected. Instead, Inside gradually transforms into a meditation on bioethics and subjectivity that’s all the more striking because of the player’s interaction with the story. I’m still not sure how to interpret the ending, but the path to get there involves one of the biggest ludo-narrative surprises I’ve ever had the pleasure to encounter. I usually don’t have any patience for concerns over spoilers, but I’d recommend going into this game spoiler-free. The ending of Inside genuinely has to be experienced to be believed.

Melissa

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Melissa
https://cattrigger.itch.io/melissa-heart

Melissa is a free-to-play retro horror visual novel about a rudimentary dating game on an old library computer. If you’re okay with dying quickly, it takes about seven minutes to play, but you can add a few more minutes by trying to stay alive for longer. The game has an easily accessible save system, so you can restart at every dialogue choice to see what happens when you beg for mercy. Good luck!

Melissa reminds me of the best parts of Doki Doki Literature Club without the need to scroll through an hour of cutesy school shenanigans. The initial dating game is exactly the sort of thing you’d find on a floppy disc next to Oregon Trail, and both the graphics and the sound design feel nicely textured and deliciously crunchy. The writing gets in and gets the job done, and the twist is a lot of fun.

The developer made a sequel called Morris…
https://cattrigger.itch.io/morris-heart

…that is significantly longer (about 25-30 minutes) and also very good. The retro nostalgia appeal is amplified by the occasional internet dial-up sounds, and at certain points the game asks you to print things out on the library’s public printer, which makes adorable dinosaur noises. Aside from the eponymous Morris, the story featured two additional characters, both of whom are delightfully unhinged. In the comments on the game’s page on Itch.io, a few people said that they’d happily date the evil older woman, and honestly? Same.

It amuses me that Melissa and Morris are both named after famous computer viruses. If you’re interested, I recommend checking out these two bizarre FBI pages, if only for their top-notch banner graphics:

The Melissa Virus
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/melissa-virus-20th-anniversary-032519

The Morris Worm
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/morris-worm-30-years-since-first-major-attack-on-internet-110218

Anyway, it seems like the developer is making a full Date Time trilogy for release on Steam, and I’m intrigued by the work they’ve posted so far. It’s interesting to think that this universe of cursed retro dating games is informed by its own system of deep lore, and I’m always here for monster computer viruses who are down to smooch.

Corpse Party

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Corpse Party is a 16-bit RPG Maker horror adventure game from 1996 that was released on multiple platforms before finally finding its way, in a substantially updated form, to the Nintendo Switch. It shows its age, but it’s definitely worth playing if you’re into retro-styled horror adventure games.

Corpse Party is divided into five chapters, each of which stands as a discrete unit accompanied by its own set of save files that can be selected from the main menu. Every chapter has a number of optional bad endings, but you need to achieve the good ending in order to unlock access to the next chapter. If you’re using a walkthrough, each chapter takes roughly an hour to complete.

You play as various members of a group of high school students who stayed late after school one evening to tell ghost stories. They unfortunately trigger a curse that transports them to an abandoned elementary school building that was shut down in the 1970s after a grisly series of abductions and murders. Different students occupy different pocket dimensions of the school, which is almost entirely cut off from reality. To make matters worse, your group of students isn’t the first batch of kids to be spirited away to the school, which is littered with corpses and haunted by vengeful ghosts. Your goal is to help the kids escape the school… if that’s even possible.  

Corpse Party is extremely gory, and not all the kids are going to make it. The game contains intense depictions of mutilation and self-harm accompanied by vivid textual descriptions and occasional environmental illustrations of an uncomfortably graphic nature. The violence occupies an intersection between disturbing, gross, and campy, and I thought it was a lot of fun.

The main challenges of Corpse Party are of the standard “find a key to unlock the door” adventure game variety. The layout of the school changes from scene to scene, but it’s not large enough to get lost in. Aside from avoiding the occasional wandering ghost, there are no reflex challenges, and your characters are very rarely in any immediate danger. If there were jump scares, they didn’t register with me. The 16-bit character sprites are very cute, even when they’re depicting corpses.

As far as horror games go, Corpse Party is relatively chill, but with one caveat:

Corpse Party is completely linear and frustratingly opaque about what you need to do to trigger the next event in any given sequence. Unless you want to walk through endless dark hallways searching every square of the map, you’re going to need a walkthrough to get through the game. The walkthrough people use is (this one), but the walkthrough can sometimes be just as opaque as the game itself.

Personally speaking, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I managed to get through the first two chapters of Corpse Party without using a walkthrough. These initial two chapters stand on their own as a story, and I felt that they were actually the best part of the game. I think it’s probably safe to say that the opening of Corpse Party is more than enough to satisfy someone with a casual interest and playstyle.

The characters are usually divided into interesting pairs, and most of what you’ll do in the game consists of walking around inside the ruins of the school building while having conversations. The kids are very good about following horror movie rules – they don’t split up or do anything stupid – but they’re at the complete mercy of the ghosts of the original murder victims, who will change the layout of the school or create traps just to mess with them. For the most part, the kids are good and gentle and kind to one another, which makes it all the more upsetting when something bad happens.

The characterization and conversations aren’t that deep, however, so you never get so attached to any character that you don’t want to see them die. My favorite death is when one of the kids gets slammed against a wall so hard that his body explodes into red pulp, which all the rest of the kids have to walk through for the remainder of the game while navigating that particular hallway intersection.

Through disjointed and disconnected teamwork, your characters learn what actually happened to the ghosts haunting the school. For curious lore hunters, there are various bits of text scattered around, from newspaper clippings to messages left by other victims of the curse. These textual passages start off as grim and gradually grow more disturbing, and it’s always a pleasure to find something new to read. There’s also an optional collection quest that encourages you to find and interact with all the corpses in each chapter; and, if you like, you can return to the main menu and read about all the horrible ways these kids died.

It’s probably more accurate to call Corpse Party a “visual novel” as opposed to an “adventure game,” but it’s fun to explore the school while interacting with various objects in the environment. It’s also fun to gain access to new areas, both to learn more about the story and to see more of the game’s pixel art. One of my favorite areas is the outdoor pool in Chapter 4, which is filled with waterlogged corpses and preceded by a hellishly filthy locker room. Good times.

Despite its frustrations, I really enjoyed Corpse Party, and the English translation created by XSeed is fantastic. While reading the game’s Wikipedia page (here), I learned that there’s a manga adaptation (here), and I had so much fun exploring this horrible haunted school that I started reading it. It’s just as ridiculous and over the top as you’d expect from a manga adaptation of a horror game, but each chapter has one or two really great horror scenes enhanced by lovingly detailed and disturbingly gruesome artwork.

Afterdream

~ Kathryn ~ 1 Comment

Afterdream is a 2D horror adventure game with puzzle elements and lo-fi pixelated graphics that takes between two to three hours to finish. It’s on Steam, but I played it on Nintendo Switch and had a fantastic time. Afterdream drops you right into the story and immediately grabs your attention, and its pacing is impeccable. The horror is mostly atmospheric, but the game features a great set of jumpscares mixed with short segments of heightened tension.

Afterdream isn’t for people who can’t tolerate horror, but I’d happily recommend it to anyone else who’s interested in trying out a short, original, and creative story game. The puzzles are fun but not too difficult, and the environmental design is really something special.

You play as a woman named Jennifer who wakes up in a filthy derelict room wearing a suit she doesn’t own. During the intermittent frame story, Jennifer relates this situation to an older man who seems to be a psychiatrist, claiming that she’s experienced an unusually realistic nightmare.

Within this nightmare, Jennifer’s job is to navigate a series of haunted houses while finding a series of objects for a series of NPCs. There are no Professor Layton style puzzles relating to number games or spatial arrangement challenges; rather, Afterdream’s puzzles are mainly fetch quests reminiscent of old-school adventure games in which a certain object needs to be applied to a certain environmental obstacle, like a key being needed to unlock a door.

The challenge, such as it is, lies in being able to form a mental map of each area and remembering what goes where. The game mechanics are extremely simple and intuitive, and there are no inventory limits or menu screens to distract the player from the immersive environment. It’s always clear what you can interact with, and the in-game text isn’t cryptic about what needs to happen.

The haunted houses don’t reveal their secrets willingly, but Jennifer is aided by a Polaroid ghost camera that she can use to scan her surroundings. The oddities exposed through the camera’s viewfinder become real once photographed. You might hear an odd ticking sound, for example, in which case your camera will reveal a ghostly clock on the wall. It’s a neat game mechanic, and it’s put to good use in a nice variety of situations.

Jennifer begins in an old and rotting apartment building and then progresses to a fancier but similarly ruined mansion, wherein a helpful ghost tells her that she’s been given an opportunity to make contact with the spirit of her recently deceased father. In order to summon his ghost, Jennifer must first find a special “portal object” hidden within the liminal space between life and the afterlife. Unfortunately, no one can say what this object looks like or where it’s hidden.

Still, Jennifer has no choice but to keep moving forward through progressively spookier areas. As a special present to me personally, there’s a dark and grimy sewer level, and it’s wonderful. There’s also a “creepy little town” level, and it’s beautiful and I love it.

Even though the game is divided into discrete stages, its story isn’t formulaic. To lighten the heavy atmosphere, the writing employs humor at key moments, with both Jennifer and the NPC ghosts occasionally poking fun at the absurdity of various situations. I really enjoyed the instances when I thought something horrible was going to happen but everything actually turned out to be perfectly wholesome. The pacing is excellent, with plenty of fun character interactions and chill periods of downtime between the creepy bits and jumpscares.

Afterdream is the perfect length for its story, and its gameplay goes from strength to strength as its setting becomes stranger and more disturbing. It might not be to the taste of people looking for more action or more explicit horror, but it was perfect for me.

One final thing: When I first saw the game’s trailer, I was like, “This looks cool, but I hope you can turn off the strobe effects.” And thankfully, you can in fact turn off the strobe effects. It’s always nice when game developers take this sort of accessibility issue into consideration.