Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Screenshot Let’s Play and Transcription
Since June of last year, I’ve been doing a mostly-on-sometimes-off playthrough, transcription, and Let’s Play of the Steam and GOG port of Higurashi When they Cry/Higurashi no Naku Koro ni on Something Awful. Someone else actually already made a forum-based, screenshot Let’s Play of this game years ago (and finished it!), but half of the images in the first arc are broken and it’s a little hard to parse.
So I thought, why not kill three birds with one stone? I can create a proper transcription of Higurashi that will be saved on its own dedicated server (the LPs in Something Awful are archived both on SA and lparchive.org, the latter once it is completed). I can also reread this sound novel that I am incredibly fond of.
Most importantly, I hope that this LP gets more people to read Higurashi. For people who either don’t want to pay 50 dollars on Steam/GOG for all of the arcs or sit down and commit 60 hours to watch video footage of a game released in 2002, this format lets you read it at your own pace in just a couple of days.
This is how the LP is presented. People who are familiar with and/or fans of Higurashi will notice a few things about this— and my choices are explained in the masterpost (which you can see as soon as you click the link to the LP). I also recorded every update in video form and put a link to it at the top of every update. (Higurashi is a sound novel after all, not a visual novel.) The recordings also have some fantastic voice acting, so check that out if possible.
I update three times a week on Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday.
Here’s the link.
My sales pitch, for those uninitiated to Higurashi or do not know why they should read it, is under the cut.
Some people may know of Higurashi because of its rather infamous Studio DEEN anime adaptation. The yandere anime or whatever.
(This is the cover of a Higurashi video game released in 2014 but the art is pretty similar to the anime’s ssshhhhh)
In the game, you play as Keiichi Maebara, a city boy who recently moved to the peaceful and close-knit village of Hinamizawa. While he initially spends his days playing various games with his new friends, the discovery of a string of disappearances and murders that happen in the village set him on a path towards conspiracies, paranoia, and a fight for his own life.
One of the game’s more memorable aspects is how it endears you to the characters through the slice-of-life aspects of the story, until those idyllic days slowly morph into something much more sinister. That in and of itself is nothing new in the horror and thriller genre— pretty much every dime a dozen horror movie starts with a peaceful suburb being threatened with a serial killer or monster on the loose, after all.
Where Higurashi differs is that it doesn’t stop there, but starts pulling the reader in, makes them want the horror and thrill to stop, for the idyllic days to come back. They start off engrossed in the wonderfully unsettling atmosphere that the author, Ryukishi, crafts with nothing but images, text, and sound. As they read one arc after another, they gain more questions even as some are answered.
Because, surprise— Higurashi is a slife-of-life, comedy, horror, suspense, thriller, murder mystery.
Every arc takes place in the same timeframe: June of 1983, but things are different. Something that happens in one arc doesn’t happen in another arc, and vice versa. Even though the characters do not retain their memories of past arcs, they still perform different actions at different times as strings are pulled behind the curtain. As someone with an omniscient viewpoint of the entire story, it is your job to piece together the puzzle and figure out just what is causing the deaths in Hinamizawa.
If that interests you, I’ll link the Let’s Play once more at the end of this post. The first post is the masterpost, which has even more information on the game as well as the LP itself. If nothing else, please read the trigger warnings. Higurashi is not a kind game to those who are squeamish. This may only be Ryukishi’s first big work— his writing and pacing is fairly rough for the first two arcs— but there’s a reason this game so thoroughly took over the fandom consciousness in the 2000s. His writing is, if nothing else, completely his own and paints vivid depictions of the cruelty humans have to live through every single day.
(A tidbit to note is that the author used to be a social worker. He writes about the topic with great skill but it is all very hard to watch/read.)
The game is also uh…very anime. It was initially sold in Comiket, after all. If you have a low tolerance for anime bullshit this might be a hard read for you. But underneath everything, the story is, at the core, a very touching one about the bonds between friends. Higurashi has a heart, no matter how ugly its exterior may seem at first glance, and I urge you to give it a shot.
Here’s the link again.
By the by, if you’re interested in a more “straightforward” murder mystery (more of an actuual murder mystery, much less straightforward), you should check out Ryukishi’s next work, Umineko no Naku Koro ni, which someone else already LPed. If you want to see how he might be like, trying to, solve…world conflict…?, the person who LPed Umineko also did one for the first arc (or Phase as it’s called) of Ciconia no Naku Koro ni. It’s all a bit vague for Ciconia, we really only have one chapter to go off of. None of these “sequels” require knowledge of the former entries to enjoy them.
FOR THE FOURTH DAY IN A ROW, I AM STILL SITTING IN A DEVASTATED HOSPITAL. PLEASE DON'T WAIT UNTIL I BECOME ANOTHER TRAGIC STORY THAT YOU WILL READ TOMORROW.
I keep imagining the moment my family will someone ask of them, "Is Fadel still alive?!" I don't know how they will answer that day. No mother, father, or sibling should have to live with this grief and fear that hangs over every soul.
Every day I fight two battles at once: one against the pain of the shrapnel lodged in my body from the b0mbing of our house, and another to find a way to afford medication for my anemia and painkillers to ease my surgical pain and prevent further fainting spells. I am so tired of this suffering; I feel like I am breaking down more and more each day.
PIease don't ign0re me Look ple@se h@lp me by d0nating so I can urgentIy bůy my medication and painkiIIers. pIease I don't deserve all this neglect. I'm not asking for miracles, just a chance to live my life without pain or disability. your h@lp or d0nate or share' my story today. Your kindness can h@lp protect my future and remind us that we are not alone.
PIease... I don't want to dìe, I just want to live without pain. I nèéd your sincere supp0rt to save my life and end this suffering as soon as possible. PIease, I would be extremely grateful to anyone who can d0nate pIease don't ignore me.
Drug arrives years after pandemic’s peak, but could still offer protection to vulnerable populations.
An antiviral pill has, for the first time, been shown to prevent COVID-19 in people exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at home, according to trial results published today in the New England Journal of Medicine1.
The drug could be a lifeline for those who still face real danger from the virus, such as care-home residents or transplant recipients on immune-suppressing medication.
Households exposed to COVID-19 now have an oral drug specifically cleared to prevent infection after contact with a sick person. The FDA listed Xocova, the brand name for ensitrelvir, as a 2026 novel drug approval for post-exposure prophylaxis of COVID-19 following contact with an infected individual. The decision fills a gap that has persisted since the pandemic’s early years: until now, no oral antiviral carried an FDA-approved indication for prevention rather than treatment.
Garage is a surreal and nightmarish point & click adventure inspired by the works of Carl Jung, developed by Kinotrope and published by Toshiba-EMI in 1999.
Garage - This weird machine is said to create a bizarre dark world by working on the subject's subconscious mind.
You are thrown into a weird world by this machine. Can you escape from it?
Hey all! Normally when I post for Mona's community aid initiative, I post about the communities of refugees she is helping. But today I went to Instagram to update you all and saw that she hasn't posted since April, and we hadn't spoken since then either. She hadn't messaged me updates like she normally does. I was very afraid. It turned out she had broken her phone during a displacement, and she hasn't been able to replace it due to the high costs. Mobile phones are a scarce and expensive resource in Ghazzah but they are a lifeline for the families there. And for Mona it is not just a lifeline for her family but also for the refugee community she has dedicated the last few years of her life serving. She cannot connect with her usual network of volunteers or access funds without her phone (she had to contact me through her mother's phone). Despite helping displaced refugees, her and her family are also displaced refugees also living out of a tent, and she cannot currently afford a replacement. Please please please help her get a new one so she can continue doing the life-saving work she has been doing. Chuffed link to support Mona.
Israeli banks are planning to end services to Palestinian banks in the West Bank. They are the only means by which Palestinians in the West Bank can receive and transfer money internationally, and they also provide the system through which many Palestinians are paid. This is a disaster in the making.
Israeli banks have informed their Palestinian counterparts that they intend to end critical banking services within weeks, Israeli and Pales
Thats not what "here comes the airplane" is referring to. The phrase "here comes the airplane" is something parents (supposedly) say when feeding fussy infants. The joke is that it looks like someone is gently feeding her a battery, not that a battery causes airplanes or whatever yall thought
👥 Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The phrase “Here comes the airplane” is spoken by parents while feeding their babies batteries, so that their babies can become airplanes. Becoming an airplane is considered good because it is a high-paying job. Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
If you were on a plane about to crash and there was only one parachute, which member of The Beatles would you give it to?
demonic possession is a decent trope but you know what's even better? demonic cohabitation. just 2 people sharing the same body and both being the world's worst roommate about it.
Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.
Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.
All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.
After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.
It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.
And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.
The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.
Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.
ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.
Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.
*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.
If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.
