Tokyo Tower becomes a yōkai’s hunting ground in BrokenLore: ASCEND, horror built on vertigo

Horror games have always loved a closed door. The basement, the hospital ward, the apartment you never leave: fear in the medium has mostly been a matter of walls closing in. Serafini Productions, the Tokyo studio behind the BrokenLore anthology, has turned that instinct inside out. Its next chapter takes place on the outside of Tokyo Tower, the red-and-white lattice that has watched over the city for generations, and the walls are gone. What is left is wind, darkness and a very long way down.

The setup is pointedly modern. Ren and Yui are rooftop climbers who live for the views and the likes on their channel, SKYLIMIT, and they sneak onto the tower at night for the stunt meant to top everything they have filmed before. In the fiction, the landmark, recreated under an official licence, becomes Elysium Tower, the tallest building in Japan. Halfway up, the climb stops being content and becomes survival. Something is waiting on the steel beams: the Rokurokubi, the yōkai of Japanese folklore who looks like an ordinary woman until her neck begins to stretch and twist like a snake.

The Rokurokubi yokai seen from behind on a steel platform of the tower in BrokenLore ASCEND — Image: Serafini Productions

The design idea is that the climb itself is the horror. BrokenLore: ASCEND is played in first person, hand over hand along exposed ledges and girders, and the stealth has nowhere to retreat to. You hide from the Rokurokubi wherever the structure allows, and every move has to be thought through before it is made, because one careless grip ends the run. Height, wind and darkness are listed by the studio as the source of fear, and that is unusual: the monster hunts you, but vertigo is the system.

What gives the premise its edge is the line the studio draws between falling and failing. In the announcement, Serafini frames a fall as more than the end of the climb; for Ren and Yui it is the end of the fame and attention they have built their whole identity around. That is the BrokenLore method. Since its founding, the studio has used each standalone chapter to put a contemporary anxiety under folklore pressure: hikikomori isolation in DON’T WATCH and DON’T LIE, the mental toll of social media in UNFOLLOW and its prequel FOLLOW. ASCEND tells its own story while adding new pieces to that shared universe, and this time the yōkai reads like the fear of being forgotten, given a body.

First-person view of a climber gripping the red beams of the tower in BrokenLore ASCEND — Image: Serafini Productions

BrokenLore: ASCEND launches on January 7, 2027, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, co-published with Singapore-based Soft Source, and it can be wishlisted now. Serafini Productions was founded in Tokyo in 2022.

The reveal also shines a light on BrokenLore: MIKI-CHAN, announced the week before for the same three platforms. Set in a Japanese high school, it follows Kazuaki, a student cramming for a university entrance exam who plugs in a mysterious thumb drive and meets MIKI-CHAN, a cheerful AI anime assistant who soon turns jealous and possessive. Players met her first as a helpful companion in DON’T LIE.

Two games, two very different rooms. One is a bedroom with a screen that will not let go; the other has no room at all, only a ledge and the city lights far below.

Tags: Horror games, Serafini Productions, BrokenLore, BrokenLore: ASCEND, Soft Source, Tokyo Tower