BODY: Most games ship with a controller option menu. Iseki Hori ships with a hardware requirement so specific it borders on a dare: you need a plastic guitar, and you need to hold it like a shovel.
Indie developer Takuhiro Miyazawa announced and released the excavation simulator on October 1 for Nintendo Switch at ¥700. The catch is in the fine print — the only supported input device is the guitar-shaped controller bundled with GUITAR LIFE -LESSON1-, HORI's Switch guitar-tutorial software. Because that controller works by docking a Joy-Con, anyone playing on Switch 2 also needs a Joy-Con (R) on hand.
The game itself is almost serene by comparison. Across eight stages set in the yard of an ordinary suburban house, you dig into the dirt to uncover buried artifacts, clearing soil until the excavation meter hits 100%. Later stages hide progressively larger relics. To dig, you grip the guitar's neck as if it were a shovel handle, thrust the controller forward to drive the blade into the earth, then flick it upward to turn over the soil.
There's also a grip gauge. The pressure sensors sitting where the frets would be have to be squeezed and held before any digging registers — presumably a safety measure, since a loosely held controller is a projectile. A "kids mode" lowers the required force; the standard "adult mode" does not, which is why Miyazawa pitches this as a "physical action game chasing the sensation of digging with your muscles." For the guitar-less, a bundled 2D minigame called Mini Iseki Hori plays on a normal controller.
The insider take
Miyazawa is a known quantity in Tokyo's alt-controller circles — he made Moai Mawashi and Iseki Climber, and he runs make.ctrl.Japan, the showcase for games built around homemade input devices that turns up at events like Tokyo Game Show. What makes Iseki Hori a neat trick is that it uses off-the-shelf hardware instead, leaning on mitate, the old Japanese comic habit of seeing one object as another — the rakugo performer's fan becoming chopsticks, a guitar becoming a spade. HORI clearly approves: the ¥12,980 guitar bundle is down to ¥7,980 at the Hori Store through October 13.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).