Suzuhara Lulu Finds a Beetle Forest Ending Where the Boy Is Rescued and the Father Is Not

NIJISANJI — Suzuhara Lulu of Nijisanji played through the horror game Beetle Forest (Kabutomushi no Mori) on Oct. 29, working toward its endings over a stream of about two and a half hours. The run closed on an ending in which the boy at the center of the story is found by a search party after two months missing, while his father is not saved. She called it a good ending and said it looked set up for a sequel.

The game casts the player as Yuta, a 7-year-old camping in a restricted forest with his father. By day he collects beetles; at night, offering beetles to a stump with a hole in its center quiets the forest, and Lulu froze in place whenever something rustled behind her. She chose the normal difficulty setting and said she liked beetles, though she was wary of spiders. Research notes scattered around the forest described a place where parallel worlds and times meet, and a later note concluded that the creatures roaming it were once human.

“That was fun. Beetle Forest ran deep.” — Suzuhara Lulu, after reaching the ending

Her first run ended when she gathered the eye, ear and mouth beetles the notes pointed to. The father disappeared, Yuta fled through the forest and reached the family car, and the screen read “welcome back” as the cycle began again. Lulu said that ending was good in its own way but that it did not save the boy. A second route then showed the father turned into a beetle and begging Yuta to stop him.

She spent the next stretch hunting for a way to defeat him, going back for a bat she had seen in the older Yuta’s section and trying to play without making offerings at the shrines. Neither worked. When she left the three cursed beetles uncaught, a news report announced that Yuta had been found near the forest entrance after two months and taken to a hospital. A later forum thread in the game hinted that he would return to the forest as an adult.

Chat compared the endings to a horror film and joked about a sequel. Lulu closed by saying she had not expected the story to go so deep, and that the game’s creatures were close enough to people that viewers who dislike bugs may have been spared. She said she would stream again at 9 p.m. on the 30th.