My Big Sister: Remastered Review – Zombie Sombria

As discussed in our review of the very impressive pixel art horror adventure Red Bow, indie developer Stranga Games has found a fascinating gap in the market, breaking away from the often unflattering stigma associated with publisher Ratalaika’s usual easy-platinum games to deliver a series of retro-style adventure games with a shared universe and a recurring theme of Japanese horror.

Introduction

While historically My Big Sister isn’t the first game in the Stranga Games series, it’s the studio’s first console release and the title that really put the developer on the map. Japanese horror, mysticism and culture progressively bleed into the game, taking over the original subtle Latin American setting to create a brilliantly twisted hybrid world.

My Big Sister: Remastered is an enhanced Director’s Cut of the original 2018 PS4 game. The remaster is once again developed by indie horror studio Stranga Games and published by Ratalaika Games as a crossbuy title for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, released on 11th October, 2024.

As a remaster, some tweaks and enhancements have been added to the story, keeping it faithful to the original while also adding more connections to its later-released prequel, Ashina: The Red Witch. Other references to the Stranga Games series are also highlighted, such as Luzia’s use of a red bow in her hair, a reference to My Big Sister’s outstanding spiritual successor, Red Bow.

Story

My Big Sister is told through an assortment of connected chapters, though these chapters are played out of sequence. Depending on which ending the player chooses, either knowingly or accidentally, these chapters may or may not follow the player’s chosen canon, resulting in these misplaced chapters acting as little more than lucid dreams which foreshadow other possible futures.

Regardless of which choices are made by the player, much of the core game plays out the same way, provided an early ending isn’t chosen. Our protagonist, Luzia, is a cheeky, sarcastic twelve-year-old with a playful sense of humour. She is frequently left in the care of her older sister, Sombria, a depressed teenager, as their single mother works long hours to keep the family afloat.

Following Sombria’s sudden ‘death’, Luzia struggles with recurring nightmares and finds herself in therapy, though no one believe’s Luzia’s story; You see, Sombria didn’t stay dead. Cursed as an undead creature and becoming less and less human each day, Luzia and Sombria set out to find a way to cure Sombria’s curse before she becomes a monster entirely.

Gameplay

The player will take control of Luzia throughout the story and explore various environments which will jump back and forth throughout the timeline, taking place in real-world locations and also a supernatural world inhabited by Yokai and other creatures. These monsters may be malevolent in nature, but they aren’t directly hostile.

Sombria will occasionally tag along, sometimes supporting her sister, as they try to find a way to break Sombria’s curse and return home. Luzia will need to search for key objects to solve simple puzzles and talk to characters to unravel the story’s secrets. However, player choices, no matter how small in the moment, can drastically change the outcome of the story.

Graphics/Sound

My Big Sister’s visual makeover is actually quite discreet in its design, similar in effort to the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series, taking 8-16bit graphics and replacing them with a brighter alternative set of 16bit visuals. If you haven’t played the original in a while, then it can be difficult to spot the many differences without side-by-side comparisons.

The game still uses 16-bit era top-down 2D visuals, however certain objects and surfaces have been recoloured to make the experience less monochrome. This is more noticeable with some of the character models, each of which is now enhanced by a portrait on their text boxes. That incredibly atmospheric soundtrack has also been reworked to include orchestral tracks, delivering a more modern experience.

Replayability/Trophies

Across the game’s multiple chapters in My Big Sister, players can expect to clear puzzles to advance through the game’s story, but be sure to take your time, consider your options, and make plenty of back-up saves if you want to experiment. With plenty of secrets and six very different endings, you’ll have your work cut out for you if you want to get the ending that Luzia and Sombria deserve.

Chapter Select is available after you’ve beaten the game once. If you miss any trophies, the chapter they can be found in can usually be returned to. You’ll find most trophies are linked to finding specific endings, and so some save manipulation and a decent trophy guide are highly recommended to get the most out of the game, and see everything there is to see.

Conclusion

Admittedly, My Big Sister: Remastered isn’t actually much of a remaster. As mentioned earlier, it’s really more of a Director’s Cut, adding a few extra scenes and some visual tweaks. This becomes most visible when we study the script, and find spelling and grammatical errors which are still present in this re-release. Misplacing the word ‘you’re’ with ‘your’ in a game that’s had seven years of fine-tuning is pretty inexcusable.

This isn’t to say My Big Sister: Remastered is a bad game; far from it, though it is something of a weak remaster, failing to really elevate the game beyond what we already had in the base version. If you missed the game the first time around, then any version of My Big Sister will have value for you. It’s still the same mind-bending, reality-questioning bizarre narrative that we came to appreciate back in 2020, with many players still considering the game Stranga’s magnum opus.

Sombria is the character that most of us will come for and will keep us playing until the end. This is where the Japanese horror emphasis really kicks in, with Sombria following the Japanese definition of a zombie rather than a western one. She isn’t a mindless, shuffling corpse with a constant need to feed, but rather a cursed young woman with transformative features who is torn between her human self and a monstrous side which she struggles to co-exist with.

In terms of progression, I actually prefer Red Bow’s more streamlined style of storytelling, with your efforts in that game working towards granting the characters a better ending, rather than an entirely different one. My Big Sister is the opposite of this, ignoring any sort of true canon with six completely different endings with no similar themes, with each even more far-fetched and fantastical than the last. It’s a game that wants you to come back and try a different route after the credits roll, and rewards your efforts with an assortment of easy trophies, and if you haven’t already, you absolutely should.