Colorful Mirai: Spooky Edition drops its customizable, player-named protagonist into a setup horror and romance both reach for constantly, to lock a stranger in a house with people she has no business trusting. She’s on her way to an art exhibition when a storm and a wrong turn strand her in front of a mansion on a hill, the only shelter around for a very inconvenient amount of weather. Six men live there, Fabious, Eliot, Lando, Milorio, Cooby, and Jusepe, and the game hands you six different reasons to regret trusting any of them, or to fall for it anyway. Letting the player rename her rather than locking in a fixed identity fit a story this focused on trust and misplaced confidence, since it kept me reading her reactions as my own rather than a character’s prewritten judgment call.
Getting through the game once only shows part of it. A sixth route, Lando’s, doesn’t even open up until you’ve already finished a few of the others, so the mansion keeps a secret from you literally until you’ve earned it. That kind of gating usually feels like padding, but here it read more like the game rewarding curiosity, since nothing about the earlier routes signals there’s someone else in the building at all.
Every one of the six men carries a face pulled straight from Colorful Mirai, the full otome this spun off from, but the resemblance stops there. Clothes, personalities, and the entire story got reworked for the horror theme, which Honey Bunny, the two-person team behind both projects, has been upfront about treating as a separate stage rather than a continuation of that other story. Not every one of the six ends up in the same place emotionally by the time their route wraps either, and knowing that only a couple of them actually grow into something better over the course of their story, rather than all six following the same redemption shape, kept me from assuming I knew where any given route was headed just because an earlier one had gone soft by the end. The team has said outright that they considered giving the spooky edition endings where the protagonist actually dies, but held off specifically out of concern for how that darker material might affect the tone of the main Colorful Mirai story it’s spun off from, a small but telling piece of restraint for a jam project built this fast. Knowing it was built in twenty-four days for the third annual Spooktober Visual Novel Jam, released September 24, 2021, changed how I read a few of the tighter scenes. Packing six distinct endings into that window is not a small ask, and the game mostly doesn’t feel like it’s straining under the deadline.
None of the six are safe company, and the game says as much upfront, warning players that this is a story about bad guys doing bad things before you’ve clicked past the title screen, along with a heads-up about loud noises and thunder early on for anyone sensitive to that kind of sound design even though there’s no jumpscare waiting behind it. That honesty carried through for me. The forty thousand words don’t waste much time softening any of these men into misunderstood sweethearts before showing you the sharper edges underneath, which kept the mansion feeling like an actual risk instead of a dating sim with spooky wallpaper.
Original backgrounds and CGs fill out the mansion, all unlockable afterward through a gallery alongside a built-in endings walkthrough for anyone chasing full completion, and the horror reskin gives Alex, the artist on the two-person team, plenty of room to push the character designs somewhere darker than their source material. The music took a different route entirely, built from Creative Commons and public domain tracks rather than a commissioned score. That fits a twenty-four day jam far better than it would a bigger production, and I never once felt like a scene was fighting its own soundtrack because of it.
There’s no character voice acting here, which is worth knowing going in if that’s part of what you look for in an otome. What the game does have instead is a well thought-out accessibility pass, audio description and subtitles built in from the start, a self-voicing option for screen readers toggled with a single keypress, access to Ren’Py’s own font accessibility menu, and a one-button mode alongside quick controls for hiding the dialogue box or grabbing a screenshot mid-scene. I don’t rely on those features myself, but running into that level of care in a free jam game still caught me off guard. The game also shipped in both English and Portuguese, reflecting the Brazilian team behind it, and reached Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android across its release, a broader spread than most jam entries this size ever bother chasing.
Reaching any of the six endings landed with more weight than I expected from something built this fast, since the game earns its darker turns instead of just announcing them. Honey Bunny funds ongoing development through Ko-fi rather than any paid tier of Spooky Edition itself, which stays available on a name-your-own-price basis, in keeping with the free jam spirit it was built under even after the fact. Colorful Mirai, the full game these characters belong to, has been on hold since 2025 while Honey Bunny figures out the resources to finish it properly, first demoed years earlier as the team’s very first attempt at making a visual novel at all, but the Spooky Edition itself is complete and stands on its own regardless of where that larger story ends up.
Verdict
Colorful Mirai: Spooky Edition takes a familiar trapped-in-a-mansion setup and stretches it across six clearly distinct men, one of whom the game makes you earn the right to even meet. Built in twenty-four days for a jam, it leans on reused character designs and public domain music rather than original scoring, but the writing doesn’t cut corners on making these six feel like real threats instead of safe fantasy. Lando’s late unlock and the total absence of voice acting are the clearest costs of the format, and neither one undoes what the team pulled off in the time they had.
