Curated by taste and lineage

A village appears every year, and every year one girl is sealed inside it as a sacrifice. Three operatives go in after her. You are playing all four of them at once, and every lapse costs you one.

The store page lays out the situation in four lines and then stops. Every year a strange uninhabited village called the Abandoned Village appears. Every year exactly one girl is confined inside it as a sacrifice. Three special forces operatives go in. You control all four of them. That is the whole design, and it is stranger than it sounds, because the three going in and the one already trapped are not a squad you switch between for tactical variety, they are four people you are personally responsible for keeping alive at the same time. The store puts the consequence plainly: each time you let your guard down, one more of them becomes a victim of the anomaly. The village is generated randomly each run, the whole thing is fifteen minutes, and the question the game asks is simply whether you get out in that window or you do not. The graphics are deliberately classic-3D so it runs light. There is no official English title; Steam's own name field is in Japanese and the canonical URL it generated just says 123. Made by 727 Not Hound, a prolific Japanese solo horror developer with sixteen titles on Steam, and a direct check of every one of those sixteen shows developer and publisher identical on all of them. One thing needs saying rather than glossing: a Switch version of this game was announced back in 2021, and the developer said at the time that a publisher had approached them. So this site checked. Nintendo's official Japanese catalogue, queried ten different ways, returns no title under this developer's name at all, while the same search returns 221 results for Mario and 90 for horror, so the search works and the absence is real. The developer wrapped the series up in 2023 calling it the end of season one. The console version never shipped, and no publisher relationship ever reached a released product. This is also not the first time this site has covered this developer, and it says so rather than pretending otherwise. Released July 25, 2022 at ¥800, it is at 92 percent across 27 reviews (25 positive, 2 negative), a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access, with no AI-generated-content disclosure and Steam's content descriptors completely empty. It grew out of a free version released on the Japanese freeware site Freem. It supports Japanese only, and of its 27 reviews exactly 2 are in English. At 27 reviews and 92 percent this is a thinner and lower number than most picks here, and a run lasts fifteen minutes; both are said here rather than buried.

Published 2026-08-01

01First, the one feeling

• Four people and one attention span is the entire horror. Nothing is chasing your character, because you do not have a character; something is moving through a village where four of your responsibilities are standing in four different places, and you can only be looking at one of them.
• The girl is already inside before you start. She is not a rescue objective you reach at the end, she is a fourth thing you are playing from the first second, which means the failure state is not that you did not save her but that you were somewhere else when it mattered.
• Fifteen minutes and a randomly generated village means the knowledge you carry between runs is not the map but the shape of your own lapses, and the game is short enough that going again costs you nothing except the admission that you know exactly which one you stopped watching.

02Who this is for (and who it is not)

03The roots of this taste

92% positive·only 27 reviews·no English support yet — yet almost no one has found it

04Make this gem shine

If it speaks to you, check it on Steam and give it your first pass. Your push is what makes a buried gem shine.

05The bloodline of this taste

• The Lost Vikings Root
• International Designated Anomaly No.123: Abandoned Village You are here
  • Read-and-build games another taste