Made by a team that started out as a sound design studio, Fragile Dreams is hardly the sort of game you’d expect to excel in the visual department. But excel it does, the detailed textures, subtle lighting effects and deep, rich colour palette all combining to create a paradoxically attractive vision of post-apocalypse Japan.

Collecting artefacts from the world reveals text flashbacks into the memories of the dead, detailing their tragic and melancholy final hours.

As the fifteen-year-old Seto, it’s the player’s burden to travel alone through this beautiful but desolate, earthquake ravaged land. Accompanied by a sentient portable computer, Seto wanders around abandoned towns and cities avoiding ghosts and wild animals and, if the first couple of hours are anything to go by, reuniting the few surviving humans with their deceased family members.

Locating those people, as well as dangerous enemies, is done through a rather clever use of the Wii remote. Putting tri-Crescendo’s audio specialism to imaginative use, the Wii Remote’s speaker amplifies the sounds of wherever the cursor happens to be pointing. This could simply emphasise ambient noise like the crickets that rest in the bushes, but also has more useful functions such as the ability to hear the growls of a dangerous beast around a corner, giving you ample opportunity to heal yourself first or just flee. Another sequence involves a game of hide and seek with a ghost girl, who can turn invisible but gives her position away through the giggles that the Remote’s speaker picks up.

Such inventive gameplay mechanics elevate Fragile Dreams slightly above the average “wave a torch around in the dark” Wii game, but there’s a danger that they might not be enough to sustain interest across the whole running time. Combat is the biggest issue. Entirely controlled by a single button press, it’s not so much hack-and-slash, more ‘whack with a stick until you get bored’. With monsters around every corner, and a levelling-up system tied to enemy deaths, combat is an essential part of the playing experience and can really de-motivate the player.

Some of the enemies are spiritual manifestations of the dead’s unhappy thoughts. They can only be seen through torchlight, forcing the player into a slow and considered pace as they scan their surroundings for threats.

With development of Fragile Dreams long since completed (it was released in Japan over a year ago) there’s no prospect of improvement or alteration between now and the UK release. We can therefore only hope that the later hours introduce more varieties of weapon or increase the complexity of the combat to a satisfying level.

It’ll be a shame if that doesn’t happen, of course. And we wouldn’t want to see an otherwise attractive and thoughtfully designed game dragged down by a monotonous central mechanic.