Walk an endlessly looping corridor and photograph its subjects. The photos you take become the deck that gets you through the night.

Photogenic Minds : Identity Buried gem

Per Steam's own listing, this is a deck-building 3D exploration psycho-horror. You walk an endlessly looping corridor and photograph objects called subjects, and each shot becomes a photo with a special power; you build your deck from those photos, and a run ends when you find and collect the soul of the dead at the corridor's end. To work out where that soul is, a logic-puzzle element has you deduce the dead person's traits and name. Situations are generated at random, you collect strange detective tools along the way, and if it feels too hard, the store says you can bring in powerful tools and force everything through. Twelve hours, from 0:00 PM to 0:00 AM, flow through the corridor, and the store asks you to control time with the power of photographs and get through the night in Rederlin, a city of frequent supernatural events that cannot get past the night; its story opens with Jennifer Silentfall, who runs a detective business there. The developer and publisher is 727 Not Hound: AUTOMATON's Japanese edition names the developer as Mr. Zama, a Japanese solo developer, with 727 Not Hound as his developer name, and Denfaminicogamer also introduces 727 Not Hound as a Japanese solo game developer. This is the third 727 Not Hound game on this site, after Days Like A Nightmare and International Designated Anomaly No.123: Abandoned Village. It grew out of a prototype, P.M. (Playable Mockup), which is still free on the Japanese freeware site Freem; that prototype is not a free version of this game, and a separate paid Playable Mockup is also on Steam. Released on September 29, 2022 as version 0.9 (the version 1.0 update followed on October 15, 2022), it is Very Positive at 89 percent across 98 reviews (87 positive), a paid title at ¥1,900, not free and not in Early Access. By language, 92 of the 98 reviews are in Japanese (81 positive; the Japanese reviews alone also rate Very Positive), with 4 in Simplified Chinese, 1 in Traditional Chinese, 1 in Korean and none in English, and all 11 negative reviews are Japanese. It supports Japanese only, although near the top of the English store page, right after the first sentence, the line '*English will be supported.' still stands, a promise that has not been kept. It has had press: in Japanese, AUTOMATON covered it four times (the announcement, the release-date news, a paragraph in a column and a one-line sale mention) and Denfaminicogamer twice, and AUTOMATON WEST ran the announcement in English. No review or feature devoted to this game alone turned up, and with 0 English reviews it has not reached English-speaking players. Honest notes on its state: the last Steam announcement is from April 2023, and a February 2023 announcement said some achievements already existed but could not yet be earned. In July 2025 the developer wrote on X that the SSD holding the project files had been corrupted, making updates to the current version impossible, and that the game would be rebuilt from scratch under the Japanese subtitle オーバーホールド, offered as a free update rather than a new purchase, with the current version kept playable through Steam's build switching, and a release planned between the end of that year and March 2026. In March 2026 the developer wrote that a complete rebuild from scratch is planned, that talks with a publisher over funding are underway, and that the development already started will continue even if those talks fail; no new date was given, and the rebuild has not been released. One Japanese negative review on Steam, from June 2026, reads in full: 未完成 ('unfinished'). On performance, AUTOMATON's October 2022 column said the heavy performance, among other things, made it hard to recommend casually; the developer later announced fixes for excessive memory use and for slowdowns during repeated play, and in April 2023 removed a memory-leak countermeasure that had put a very heavy load on some systems. How it runs today is unconfirmed. On the prototype's Freem page, the developer adds that any similarity to a game where you exorcise spirits with a camera is coincidental.

Dominion The origin

The origin of this taste: Dominion, the card game designed by Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games in 2008. Every player starts from the same ten-card deck, seven Coppers and three Estates, buys cards from a common supply to improve it, and draws those new cards on later turns; whoever ends with the most victory points wins. English Wikipedia calls it the first deck-building game and says it inspired a genre built on that central mechanic. The link to Photogenic Minds : Identity is this site's reading, not the developer's claim. On the prototype's Freem page, the developer writes that some players may be reminded of a few games they know, and then only: 'Yes, it is based on that game. That one, and that one. Those two are the main pillars,' without naming either. This site goes by how others describe it: AUTOMATON's announcement article, also published in English on AUTOMATON WEST, likens its basic rules to Dominion-style deck-building card games; AUTOMATON's October 2022 column says its deck-building resembles Dominion; and the outlet's release-date article said the same of the rules of the earlier Playable Mockup it was built on. Two Japanese Steam reviews also name Dominion, one calling it Dominion played as an FPS horror game. What carries over is the core of growing your own deck as you play. Where they plainly differ: Dominion is a competitive card game for two to four players, with no horror, exploration or deduction, while Photogenic Minds : Identity is a single-player first-person 3D psycho-horror where you make your cards by taking photos, walk a looping corridor through twelve hours, and deduce the dead person's traits and name.