It’s been several years since I last played Persona 4, and I feel like a lot of my most vivid memories of Atlus’ supernatural murder mystery RPG are about things that the nearly two decades since the game originally launched in 2008 have made me worried to revisit. For a lot of players, Persona 4’s story feels dated, and fails to live up to its own themes of accepting oneself as it throws the very characters who are working through their own shit under the bus. So when I got a chance to play some of the early segments of the Persona 4 Revival remake, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much some parts of it still hold up.

The roughly 45 minutes I played were from Revival ’s first “episode,” in which protagonist Yu Narukami, his best friend Yosuke Hanamura, and a sentient bear mascot named Teddie have entered some kind of alternate dimension inside a TV at Junes, the local equivalent of a Walmart or Target opening up in the small, simple town of Inaba. Inside, they find a distorted version of their boonies hometown, and in it they hear ominous echoes of the locals gossipping about their senior classmate Saki reverberating through the town. Saki is the daughter of one of the local liquor store owners and has been dealing with a lot of scrutiny and stress about working at Junes while her family’s business is struggling under the big chain’s newfound dominance in the town.

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