Jisatsu has been out for a few days now, and having played through the game a couple of times, there’s certainly something enigmatic and creepy about the story. What makes Jisatsu different than most Chilla’s Art games is that there isn’t much in the way of traditional storytelling. The narrative is pretty sparse this time around.

In this article, we’ll give a brief overview of the main story beats, as well as dig into some speculation and theories about the game.

The story kicks off as a media company is brainstorming ways to kick up fresh content. Always hungry to stay relevant, the Boss gives some poor Employee the totally ethical task of breaking into an abandoned home, hoping to capture anything supernatural on camera.

What’s here is a story about the slow destruction of a family via the influence of a demonic entity. It’s told through a series of videotapes you uncover as you play, which give firsthand recounts of what went down.

It’s through these tapes we can get a mostly clear picture as to what happened. The tapes appear to be delivered to us in chronological order, so we can go tape-by-tape to explain the story.

Tape One

The first tape opens with a young boy filming an elderly couple praying over the bodies of two people, who are covered in sheets. Beside them are two portraits, both of which have seemingly been redacted. This is an odd feature, and one we’ll encounter more throughout the game, and we’ll speak in-depth about it towards the end.

It’s never explicitly stated what befell the couple that died, but based on the events to come, we can get a good idea. We can assume the elderly folks are the boy’s grandparents and the deceased are his parents.

The boy walks out of the room and enters a side room down the hall. Inside the room, he opens a closet and we see a smattering of blood and feathers within.

The camera cuts to black, and we then see the boy holding a dead bird in his hands, preparing to bury it outside. Before he can do so, he’s seemingly called to by something around the corner. He stops what he’s doing, and goes to it. In a shack outside his home, he speaks to a voice that’s echoing out from below ground. This entity is the prime antagonist in the of  Jisatsu, and we’ll be seeing, or rather, hearing, much more from it as we go.

The voice opens their conversation with the line “Well done,” which is a very interesting choice. That implies that the boy and the Entity had already been working together, and that the Entity has asked something of him. Based on what we see later in the game, it could be believed that the boy killed his parents.  The Entity is aware of this and tells that boy that the “odor of mortality” has made him extremely hungry.

The boy then dutifully goes back to grab the dead bird and then tosses it into the hole to feed the entity. That’s the ending of tape one.

Tape Two

Tape two begins with the boy speaking to the Entity again. It asks him to bring him the head of the carp. The Entity seems aware enough of its surroundings, despite residing in the hole, as there is a pond nearby that the boy goes to. There, he fishes out a carp and brings it back. It’s worth mentioning that once he’s acquired the carp, a censored image appears in the pond. It’s unclear what this is. We can speculate on this later.

The Entity refuses to eat the whole fish, so the boy hides in a closet and cuts the head off the carp with a crude saw. Now we have some context as to how he found the bird in the first closet. For some reason, this is where the boy carries out the tasks asked of him by the entity.

Once done, he leaves the closet, and we see several more decapitated carp lying around the room, implying he’s been sustaining the Entity off these fish for some time now. It’s not clear why the adults in the home have not noticed this, but nonetheless, the boy delivers the food to the Entity. That is the end of tape two.

Tape Three

Tape three opens with the boy peering into a room where the grandmother we’ve seen in previous tapes is lying on the floor. Going around the corner to get a better look, the boy sees she’s dead, with a crow pecking at her eyes. Turning around, a large censored object stands outside the house, visible through a window.

Soon, we can see the grandfather discover the body and slowly turn to look at the boy peering in. Perhaps he’s catching on to what the boy has been getting up to.

The tape cuts to black, and we see the boy once again talking with the entity. Beside it, there’s a traditional Japanese doll. The entity alludes to the doll being important, and they say the boy must adorn it with a piece of his grandmother’s hair.

He does this and returns to the entity. That then ends tape three.

Tape Four

The fourth tape begins with the boy climbing out of a tunnel that’s been dug beneath his home. We’ll discover more about this later.

He returns to the Entity which tells him that his grandfather has passed away in the bathtub, and they say the boy should remove his fingernails and bring them back to it.

Doing this ends tape three. Not super long, but we get another opportunity to see that whatever kind of entity is tormenting the family, it relies on tithes being brought to it to sustain itself.

Tape Five

After heading into the tunnel shown to us in tape four to view the final tape, this one opens with a demand from the Entity. He tells the boy to invert every cross that’s around the home. This is a classic Christian trope to signal a demonic presence.

As he goes about his task, signs of the entity’s presence increase rapidly. We see long hair dangled over furniture, crows caw seemingly everywhere, and dolls begin to move.

Once all crosses have been turned, the tape abruptly ends.

Ending Explained

Upon ending the final tape, the player attempts to leave the tunnel under the house. As he’s doing so, someone appears from the same tunnel and chases after them.

The Employee manages to get to the car and drive off, but they lose their way on a narrow road. Unable to turn around, he throws the car in reverse but stops and flees the car shortly thereafter. He does this because he sees that the man is still following and he has a better chance on-foot.

The man pursues him and is soon seen dragging the player back into frame.

We then see the man dismembering the Employee,  stuffing them into a bag, and, at the Entity’s request, delivering it.

We then have another hard cut to these tapes being played in an office. There are two men viewing them, one of which is the boss from the beginning of the game, the same one who sent the player to the house. He explains that somebody sent them these tapes, but he’s unsure who.

The other man leaves the room, and the boss follows soon after but discovers the other man lying on the floor. As he investigates, the killer from the videotapes is revealed to have been hiding in a nearby closet, and the game ends.

We can learn from the ending that the killer is the boy from the original video tapes. Seeing as the house the player investigates is absolute ruin, we can assume that many, many years have passed since their recordings, so the age difference makes sense.

Another thing is the killer is wearing the same white socks and sandal combo that we see the boy wearing throughout the game.

Lastly, and this is debatable, but the killer is revealed to have been hiding in the closet in the office, and we see several times through the videotapes that the boy used to hide away in closets at home when doing the bidding of the Entity.

It’s not exactly clear as to why the killer sent the videotapes to the news company. Perhaps he viewed the footage and came to learn why the player was there and simply chose the boss as the next victim?

While we can’t determine his MO exactly, the fact that the killer sent the videotapes to the news company could help us make sense of those weird censored images we see throughout the game.

What Are The Censored Images?

With the assumption that the killer sent the tapes to the news company, we can draw the conclusion that the killer was also the one who redacted the images from the tapes. What were they, and why were they censored? We can only guess.

But we generally see the censored objects around key moments of the Entity’s influence. These could possibly be manifestations of the entity’s presence in some form. As the player, we see apparitions of a woman standing in the hallway or peering out from a window, perhaps these are the same sorts of things that the boy captured on his recordings but opted to remove them as to hide any explicit evidence of the entity’s existence.

Seeing as the entity spoke only to the boy, we can assume that it’s secretive about revealing itself. Couple this with the makeshift shrine underground, and you get the impression this whole thing is best kept under wraps. So, while the killer wanted to send the tapes to the news company, he wanted to hide any explicit evidence of the Entity itself. Maybe the Entity once again became hungry, and after devouring the Employee, urged the killer to send the tapes and pursue the rest of the company.

It wouldn’t be too out of the ordinary for the Entity to make a strange request like this, as it’s already asked the boy to do odd things like taking the grandmother’s hair or the grandfather’s fingernails.

What Is The Entity?

In Jisatsu, we never get a good look at the entity itself. But we can gather that it’s very old, based on its use of archaic English.

We can also glean some information from its use of Christian imagery to make some informed guesses about its origin. Most of this is seen in the final stretches of the game when the Employee heads into the underground tunnel. We see several statues of Mary and portraits of Jesus Christ that have their faces redacted. Perhaps these were brought down there by the killer as offerings, and as such, we can see the Entity’s influence or manifestation on them?

Then there is the not-so-subtle task of inverting all the crosses in the home. This is a classic trope used in movies and literature to represent demonic presence, specifically of the Christian variety.

We also see the grandparents praying over the bodies of the boy’s parents with crosses clasped in their hands. Perhaps they had some notion of what kind of entity they were dealing with?

With all of this, we can gather we’re dealing with some kind of demon. It preys on the weakest member of the family to grow in power through tithes and eventually full-on murder. It hides behind Christian imagery like statues of Mary and portraits of Jesus, using them as mockeries of what they represent.

One of the highlights of Jisatsu is its vague story. Chilla’s Art honed their environmental storytelling with this one, and I’m hopeful to see more of this style in future games.