Mysterious Forum and 7 Rumors stages its entire story as a chat interface, built around a school newspaper club whose private forum has developed a habit of turning whatever gets posted to it into something real. A cursed photo kicks off the trouble in the first chapter, sent to one club member’s own phone, carrying a rumor that says whoever receives it is marked to die.
Entabridge Co., Ltd. built the whole thing for Android and iOS, launching it on September 22, 2018 as the third entry in the studio’s own chat-story format, following two earlier volumes in the same style. It went on to place among the Google Indie Games Festival’s Top 10 that year, and it later became the studio’s first release to get a full English translation.
Akane Kasai anchors most of the story as the player’s main perspective, an eleventh grader cheerful and energetic enough to read as ordinary until the cracks in that cheer start showing. Yuuki Tougou, a year below her, balances that energy with a quieter, more cautious mind, the kind of member who helps Akane with her homework despite being the younger of the two. Shino Kominami, a year ahead of both of them, runs the club as its calm, dependable president. The three of them investigate each new rumor together, but the perspective actually shifts between them chapter to chapter. Yuuki takes over as the player’s eyes for Someone Is Here and Stray Child Hitahita San, while Shino leads Promising Cherry Blossom, so a reader ends up living each rumor through whichever member ends up closest to the danger rather than watching Akane handle everything from a fixed distance.
A fourth club-adjacent figure, referred to simply as the Mystery Member and later named Shiho, also factors into the newspaper club’s world without carrying a chapter of her own the way the main three do. Around them sits a small orbit of named rumor figures, the Girl in the Photo, the presence simply called Someone, the Cherry Blossom Girl, the White Hands, and Hitahita San among them, each one tied to its own chapter without needing its resolution spelled out here.
Seven chapters make up the main story, stretching from a starting date in April 2017 to an ending point the following February, each one built around a different rumor pulled straight off the forum. The chat format keeps every investigation feeling like it’s unfolding on an actual phone screen rather than a traditional dialogue box. That framing does real work, making each new rumor feel like something arriving in real time rather than a story being told after the fact.
Choices decide which of a chapter’s paths a reader sees and which ending they land on, and every chapter carries at least one good ending and one bad one, with a partial exception. The third chapter has no bad ending available at all, a deliberate breather between the darker rumors surrounding it on either side, though it still splits into two distinct good outcomes depending on the choices made along the way. I found myself replaying entire chapters just to catch a bad ending I’d missed the first time through. The game keeps a running list of every ending discovered so far, letting a reader jump straight back to whichever one is still missing rather than replaying blind.
Finishing every chapter with both its good and bad endings unlocks a bonus chapter that closes out loose threads the main seven leave open, and it slips in a small, self-aware moment where Akane appears briefly while the characters discuss the idea of a sequel. That bonus chapter also brings in Rin Kikuchi, a character from Entabridge’s later release I.B. the Future Destined By Unsociable Me, as a direct nod between the two games. I.B. returns the favor in its own fourth chapter, where choosing to look for a forum leads its cast into a conversation about this one, though none of Mysterious Forum’s own characters actually turn up there in person. A separate Extra chapter exists for anyone who wants more once the free content runs out, unlockable either by paying directly or by working through a set number of in-game ads instead, and Entabridge released a companion artbook alongside the game for readers who want the art outside of the story itself.
Ads show up often enough between chapters and after bad endings that I noticed the rhythm of the interruptions almost as much as the story itself. The option to skip straight to any ending still missing at least cut down on how often I had to sit through them twice, which made the completionist chase feel less like a grind than it could have.
Each chapter’s mystery builds from something small and mundane into a reveal that recontextualizes what came before it, without leaning on cheap jump scares to get there. The fourth chapter’s rumor about a pale hand hanging out of a crevice is a good example of that pattern, starting from a small, specific urban-legend image before the chapter builds an entire investigation around it. There’s even a small hidden exchange tucked into the third chapter, where picking watercolors during an unrelated task sends the club off on a tangent about a seven-color monster rumor that never gets its own dedicated chapter, the kind of side detail that rewards a reader poking at choices that don’t look load-bearing. I won’t say what chapter seven does differently from the six before it, only that it changed how I read back through everything that led up to it.
The English translation gets a little rough in places, occasional phrasing that clearly started life in Japanese, but that roughness works oddly in the story’s favor. It gives the forum posts and chat messages an unpolished, unmistakably foreign-message-board voice that a slicker localization might have sanded right out of them.
Character art stays clean and expressive in a fairly standard mobile anime style, which works in the story’s favor since it keeps the horror rooted in what the chat messages say rather than in anything the visuals try to do on their own. The cast’s color coding carries real specificity too, Yuuki rendered in green with red hair and a blue collared shirt that swaps in a jacket once winter hits, Shino marked by green hair and oval glasses over a dark blue skirt and a red bow at her collar, small visual shorthand that keeps a reader oriented even when perspective jumps between characters. Some endings lean into grotesque, bloody descriptions the game warns about upfront, matching the 12-plus rating it carries on the App Store, and that warning held up honestly rather than overselling what actually shows up.
About two hours covers the whole free story, and Entabridge clearly built it to reward the kind of player willing to replay a chapter just to see the ending they missed the first time.
Verdict
Horror rarely gets this much mileage out of a simple chat window, but Mysterious Forum and 7 Rumors pulls it off, using seven self-contained rumors that all pay off once chapter seven reframes what the forum has actually been doing the whole time. Ad breaks interrupt the pacing more than I’d have liked, but a full ending tracker, a rotating cast of playable perspectives, and a bonus chapter that rewards full completion, crossover cameo included, make chasing every rumor down worth the time. Two hours is a small ask for a story this willing to earn its reveals honestly.
