Grauen no Torikago Kapitel 1: Keiyaku

Grauen no Torikago Kapitel 1: Keiyaku (グラウエンの鳥籠 Kapitel 1 「契約」) is not a game, but the first chapter of an horror movie.

This movie is rather unusual:

1) It was sold exclusively through the Dreamcast Direct online service.

2) It’s divided into 365 episodes on 6 discs. Each episode lasts one minute.

3) It was impossible to watch all the episodes at once – they opened gradually. From October 1, 1999 to October 2000, it was necessary to connect Dreamcast to the Internet every day and download special save files on the VMU that opened new episodes.

The servers went offline shortly after. Now it is necessary to use a special VMU save or directly extract the videos of the gdi disc image to watch the film.

The sequels of Grauen no Torikago were only available to consumers who had finished previous chapters, making later entries exceedingly rare.

The main character of Grauen no Torikago is a 16-year-old schoolgirl named Nao Tsunoda. Recently, she decided to start living separately from her parents – and moved to Tokyo’s Grauenheim apartment complex. But one day, Nao’s life turns into a nightmare when she suddenly discovers the headless corpse of her neighbor (Erica Shimizu) on the roof of the house.

And having entered a neighbor’s apartment, Nao sees an even more eerie scene: music from the opera Faust plays in the room, and Erica’s severed head hangs from the ceiling and makes strange howling sounds! The killer snapped the girl’s head and connected it through a hose to the gas pipe so that the head “sang” to the music from the CD player … But why did the killer do it? Just out of a desire to mock the corpse, or is there a secret meaning in its actions?

Soon the chain of brutal murder continues – and it becomes clear that a psychopath is hunting the inhabitants of Grauenheim. Moreover, it not only kills people, but also disfigures their corpses so that they carry a certain symbolism in themselves. Will our heroine be able to unravel this symbolism and reveal the identity of the killer, or is she destined to become another victim of a maniac?