The Horror Game That Is Impossible To Translate
2025.12.2
If you don't know already, translating things (mostly lyrics) is one of my lesser-known hobbies (as shown by this lyricstranslate.com account, owned by yours truly). Translating is good exercise even if LLMs killed a good part of the required work; it requires you to have a solid understanding of both languages and all the culture and nuances of the source language that can, will, and very often do come over. Anyone who has been serious about this once or twice would agree there's a certain kind of hardship to it; and if they don't think so, they're lying. But more often than not, a translation is possible with various degrees of difficulty and/or trade-off (at the very least, literal transltion of words is always possible); it's not a common occurence that you encounter a case where you absolutely can't do anything without ruining the major part of the information, the kind of cases where no retelling of the original meaning can maintain the source material's original form.
That's why when I realized I'm looking at exactly one of such cases when looking at the game titled PSA
(made by one SERIALSOFT) I was slightly surprised and filled with a mild sense of defeat. It became somewhat of an Internet sensation among the Japanese when it released about a year ago, and the first thing that stood out for me is that somehow I barely saw any vtubers - Japanese or otherwise - playing this game. It kinda goes against one's intuition, but I'd imagine vtubers actually don't play that much game when they're not streaming or making videos, since all games are potential stream/video material; that said, the lack of coverage of this game outside of Japan (a small part of it, no less) was astonishing to me, considering that from what I've seen this is a short but really good game.
Some modest amount of spoilers for this game. Proceed with caution. (Click on me when you're ready.)
I suppose this is also due to how the game works: it involves using the camera as one of the biggest shock instrument, so not necessarily streamer-friendly.
In short, PSA
is a "spot the anomaly" game similar to games like Exit 8
. In the game you're required to monitor a list of TV channels which are broadcasting old-school 80s/90s style TV things like weather broadcasts, astrology luck predictions (it was and still is a big thing in Japan), harmless sceneries and - of course - public service announcements. First of all, the game is already not very translation-friendly just by the form it's in: different countries, of course, does their PSA and filler TV programs differently. Think about it - it's not very likely that the way PSA
presents itself would invoke the same amount (and/or the kind) of uneasiness to someone from (say) the UK. And when you combine it with the inherent difference between Japanese and English, things are only getting harder from here, for example:
One of the anomalies. See the "すぐきます" at the top.
How should you translate the sentence "すぐきます" in this context? If we do it literally we will have something like "Coming right now", which sounds more like an announcement about the next TV programme rather than some unknown existence taking people's lives through abnormal TV screens; no matter what you try (as I have tried myself) it fails to properly convey the eerie feeling of "what the heck do you mean by 'coming' and what the heck is going to come at me". There is also this one, which straight up requires you to understand enough Kanji to actually be scared:
I made the image above a little bit smaller so that you can be less scared.
I'd imagine that for people who don't know Chinese characters this is nothing more than a cool-looking glyph, and the eyes that pop up later is nothing more than a little bit of weirdness - a little bit cheap but still acceptable. Maybe I was reading too much into this and it was only meant to be a symbolic approximate of some three-eyed monster with many limbs, but to someone who's familiar with Chinese characters, this glyph is so obviously not a real Chinse character (it was apparently made up by the game author) it lands right inside the uncanny valley: it immediately reads as an unnatural combination of three separate 目 (this means "eye", which explains the eye bit) on a 灬 instead of a single coherent thing.
I tried my best to think of something similar:
...Which somehow looks more like a weird ad for a weird "protestant" Christian church rather than actually being scary. I suppose one can also lay into the whole "devil" "antichrist" thing:
Appropriate color palette might be needed, e.g. white, gray and red instead of green and yellow.
...But then it would start to not look like a translation, and one could rightly argue if similar things were about to happen more than a few times, it would not be the original game anymore.
It's at this point I decided I should forget about making an English patch for this game; my belief is that one should respect the source material no matter what, and if that stops you from translating, then you should stop translating. It truly is a shame because it's a really solid piece of art, not in a "all-around masterpiece" kind of way, but in the "do one thing and do it very well" kind of way; unfortunately it being this good of a job somehow ended up preventing it from being enjoyed by more people. Oh well.