A free text adventure from a Japanese developer, where every floor asks whether you press on or withdraw.

Arai-san Mansion Exploration Game: Incarnation Buried gem

Per its Steam store page, Arai-san Mansion Exploration Game: Incarnation is a command-driven text adventure in which you take the elevator through a many-floored mansion full of anomalies. You are staff of a specialist investigation organization whose job is to keep the anomalies from leaking into the outside world and to find a way to contain the mystery. You explore with the Action and Ally cards you collect and your own Skills, and tense card battles are the core; the central decision is whether to press on or withdraw. It is a derivative of a fan work: it is based on Kemono Friends and on Mr. Abubu's fan work Arai-san Mansion, which the Steam Japanese text and the developer's note both state, and the note cites the Kemono Friends fan-creation guidelines and Mr. Abubu's February 2020 post saying people are welcome to draw freely. Steam lists A.C.3 as both developer and publisher, the maker is Yuwan, and Japanese development is confirmed by the developer's Japanese-language personal site nightbug.net, the developer's own note announcing the store page, and a gamebiz announcement that names Yuwan as developer; no text directly stating nationality was found, but the confidence is high. The same site links to an earlier Arai-san Mansion exploration game on Furiimu!, and according to the developer's note, the Steam version is a graphical remake of the earlier command-prompt version distributed on Furiimu!. The Steam version was released on May 23, 2026 and is free (Free To Play, not Early Access; we have not checked whether any paid element exists). It supports Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English and Russian. It is Very Positive on Steam: 109 of 114 reviews are positive, about 96 percent. By language, 52 are Japanese, 32 Korean, 9 Traditional Chinese, 8 Simplified Chinese, 5 English and 8 other, so Japanese is the largest but Korean is a clear second. Steam's content descriptor IDs are empty. The Steam AI disclosure has three points: base images for some backgrounds and non-character card illustrations were generated with AI and hand-edited by the developer, the translation is mainly machine translation, and there is an optional AI text feature for exploration flavor text that only runs if the player supplies their own API endpoint and does not affect the main game; the developer's note says the 400-plus background images are AI-made. In Japan, gamebiz ran an announcement of the store page; we found no English-language editorial coverage (not an exhaustive search), and with 5 English reviews it has barely reached Western players.

SCP Foundation The origin

The origin of this taste: the SCP Foundation, a web-based collaborative fiction project begun in 2007, in which anonymous writers document fictional anomalous entities and phenomena as the classified files of a secret agency that Secures, Contains and Protects them. The link to Arai-san Mansion Exploration Game: Incarnation is this site's own reading, not a claim by the developer: the developer names no influence, and neither the Steam text nor the note mentions the SCP Foundation. What the two share is the core of the mechanism: you act as staff of an organization, keep anomalies from leaking outside, and look for a way to contain them. Where they differ: the Foundation is documents to be read, while this game is a command-driven text adventure where you take the elevator through a many-floored mansion, bring cards and Skills, and decide on each floor whether to press on or withdraw. Its Steam tags include Psychological Horror, Investigation, Surreal and Exploration, which places it as an investigation of a facility to contain anomalies rather than a ghost-story or looping-tragedy horror.