(images of the game from Centerscore's website)
J2ME Horror is an extremely underrated genre. With such small screens, technical limitations of J2ME, storage constraints (that hadn't been seen since the Famicom days) and lack of controls developers had to put in a lot of effort and plan out how best convey scary elements. Wolf Moon, Nowhere, Darkest Fear and more all had successfully pulled off a horror concept on a flip phone.
They each also have a certain charm to them. Wolf Moon has fascinating mechanics, Nowhere, despite the screen size has gorgeous graphics and Darkest Fear has unique puzzles and atmosphere.
And, while I love J2ME horror a lot the so-called first ever J2ME horror game remains elusive. It is known as 'Alone: The Horror Begins' and is the subject of today's Searchlight Post.
Alone: The Horror Begins is allegedly (more on that later) a J2ME game developed by Centrescore, a company I can barely find any information about. This company is hard to track down. After scouring their old website I still can't figure out where they were even located. I guess somewhere in the U.S.A. but even then all the info I have is circumstantial. In their lifetime none of the games they made were that popular. They never quite made it out of obscurity. A cursory search indicates their most successful game being "Surviving High School '07", a coming of age group of minigames. Alone was their only foray into horror games before their disappearance. It appears that in 2006, Vivendi Games purchased Centrescore, eventually bringing all their IPs under that Vivendi hood. Under the Vivendi hood they were dissolved and all of their games forgotten. Makes you wonder why Vivendi even wasted the money aquiring them.
This game was apparently released in November 2005 to various digital storefronts. Some claim it unreleased but there's at least one link that proves it was public and for sale. It was, at some point available for sale on EasyEdge, a now discontinued mobile phone service.
During the search for this game a lot of inconsistencies came up.
This game is known as a J2ME game, a simple web search will back me up. But looking at that EasyEdge page one can see none of the phones listed were actually J2ME phones. They all ran BREW, a whole separate system. For comparison it's like saying a games was made for the SNES but it was really a Genesis game. BREW was on some whole other thing.
Combing through Reddit posts there is a belief that game was never publicly released. Course the link above disproves that, but it could also mean the game was pulled shortly after launch. That would certainly explain the lack of preservation around it.
Back then, a lot of companies tended to offer both J2ME and BREW versions. With that knowledge plus the various J2ME whispers I wouldn't completely rule out a J2ME port existing. One of the surviving videos of the game makes claim that Alone could have had a J2ME-port. I acknowledge that it's also possible the uploader doesn't even know the difference. Most don't even know that BREW was a thing and plenty can't even tell the difference. Another example of misinfo are the comments I’ve seen claiming this game came out in 2003, 2007 and 2005. But despite all the misinformation nobody has a copy. It is undeniable to acknowledge the roll pirates had in early J2ME preservation. But unfortunately, despite efforts Centrescore was never popular enough to garner their attention.
Hell with all the people looking for it, the game is far more popular now than it was when it actually released back in 2005.
Alone sees you playing as your own self-insert. To quote the games tagline...
A plane crash in the dark of night leads to an unexpected and horrifying mystery. Evil lurks around every corner, thirsting for the blood of the innocent. What is this strange place? What's causing this terrible nightmare? Frightened and alone you wander deeper into the unknown armed only with a flashlight and an old cattle prod. Will you survive long enough to find the answers you so desperately need? Will you survive long enough to escape the night?Gameplay is a bit similar to Nowhere, though not as psychological. From a top-down view you walk around as you uncover whatever the hell is going on in this dark forest. Centrescore also makes the claim that Alone is the first ever J2ME Horror game. No idea how true that is.
