Zelle (PC) review "Reader beware: The less you know going into this one, the better..."

I'm going to start this review by telling you that the less you know going into Zelle, the better. All I will say is that it is an occult adventure game with horror and comedy elements. Now, scroll down to the bottom and look at the rating. You see it? Good. Now go play.

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You're still here... Sigh... I guess I have to do my job after all...

Non-mainstream developers get a little more creative wiggle room than your average AAA company. No, we won't see Activision Blizzard releasing a title akin to Hylics or Kio's Adventure as anything more than a budget offering, if that. I think that's one thing that draws me to indie and Japanese games: they're more willing plunge into bolder and weirder material. Zelle, for instance...

Yeah, this game is pretty odd. It starts off looking and playing like a simplified Shadowgate clone. You sit in an ordinary room and a guy in a creepy mask tells you not to leave. So what else do you do except leave? I mean, what's there to play if you remain sedentary? So you exit the room after someone mysteriously unlocks it and venture into the strangeness beyond.



Zelle drip-feeds you its material, slowly showing you its peculiar core. It starts off as your standard, first-person, inventory-based adventure affair, where you navigate single-screen rooms and portions of corridors while hunting down event items. Before long, you engage in a troubling conversation with a goddess who has some obvious ulterior motives, and you are the center piece of her master plan. She gives you three rosaries that serve as weapons, and tells you to mind the demons.

You read that correctly: here there be demons, and they assume a wide range of disturbing, zany, or disturbingly zany forms. Not long after your conversation with the goddess, a foe consisting of little more than a doll's head on a stick with a shirt crudely attached to it bounces toward you. An encounter ensues, and the creature shows you its brightly colored eyes. Your three rosaries appear at the bottom of the screen, coming in three glorious colors: red, blue, and yellow. You have seconds at that point to select the correct color, there by causing the doll's head to erupt in a display of gore.

In fact, pretty much any time you go anywhere, something creepy comes out towards you. A walk through an exterior setting pits you against a werewolf who vanishes in bloody fashion when vanquished. Another couple of battle stick you with rats that split in half vertically. Hell, during one segment, you anger a cartoony anthorpomorphic moon who resembles an anime rendition of Mac Tonight. And his demise is no less gruesome.



However, each fight mixes up the combat system a little. Rather than merely slapping down all three rosaries for you to grab without resistance, the game tries to throw screwballs your way. At one point, you try to click on the cross you want to use, and it instantly swaps places with another one, causing you to fail and die if your reflexes aren't up to snuff. Later on, the rosaries fly all over the screen, moving in such odd patterns that every encounter becomes a mini-game in itself. One enemy stands still while various crosses spin around him, and another plays a shell game with the rosaries, forcing you to watch them carefully to find the one you need.

For the most part, the first half of the campaign plays out like this: you explore rooms, hunt down items, find places to use them, and exorcise demons. Only a few segments deviate from this structure, as you enter a dance-off with a child. Another doesn't involve much interaction, but regards a man breaking into the castle in which you're trapped. The man searches for treasure to take home and fatten his bank account, but comes into contact with something much worse...

Eventually, the campaign shifts focus after you leave the fortress. At that point, it becomes a top-down adventure title with very few event items to secure. Instead, you mosey about a forest, negotiate some floating rocks without falling into a river, and find yourself in a special place that's a massive spoiler.



Things continue to get weird from here. Battles fuzz out and adversaries frequently break the fourth wall. You sometimes defeat them and the action transitions to a screen that rates your timing and skills, except you notice a couple of fingers protrude from the middle of the card. The villain you just faced pushes the screen open, telling you it's not defeated just yet...

You'll see all manner of sights, from massive piles of skulls to a giant kiwi-like demon with a voracious appetite. At another point, you seemingly become the ward of an evil entity who introduces itself to you as a “mother who doesn't breastfeed,” but plans to torture you to the point of mutilation, only to patch your body back up so you can recover and be tormented again.

Yet, at the heart of it all there's a moving tale about the inevitability of death and coping with loss. Somehow, this game that features grim reapers with cute scythes that have faces,a possessed child's drawing, and a major villain who's defeated when the protagonist merely kicks him, also sports a few touching moments late in the proceedings revolving around—yep, you guessed it—the power of love and friendship. This is a Japanese game, after all. It wouldn't be right if you didn't scotch one your biggest threats using camaraderie.

Ultimately, Zelle is a weird, dark, creepy, funny, heartfelt adventure title that I'm sure few people have discovered. That's a shame, because the world's really missing out on something here...

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (October 31, 2025) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.