Update with some impressions now that the game is out in Japan
The Kamaitachi Remake tells the same story as the 1994 original, but while many lines are taken directly from the old game, the script is not a 1:1 copy. Scenes are expanded upon and/or slightly changed.
The voice acting makes it feel more modern and the cast is a good fit for most characters. The game let's you disable all voice acting or just the VO for certain characters (e.g. Touru, the main protagonist whose voice sounds younger than I had imagined him sounding while reading the old game). Another big plus is the voice acting for Kayama, a business man in his 50s. It's more fun to hear Kansai dialect (often translated to sound like a Southern US accent, e.g. in Banshee's Last Cry) spoken out loud than having to read it.
So far, the new music has largely consisted of remixes of old songs with new ones added to give it more variety. It's not quite as moody as the old music imo, but not bad either.
Like mentioned in the Famitsu review, the lack of any touch-screen controls makes no sense. When I played the 1994 original on Vita via PS1 classics, I used the system settings to map buttons to the touch screen. Turning pages via touching the screen is my preferred way of reading VNs and it's frankly baffling that the 2017 game doesn't give you at least that option despite a large settings menu that let's you fine-tune many other things.
I've only played a few hours, so I haven't made it to the side-stories yet. But the most recent Famitsu had an article that went into detail: The new game includes the side-stories from the SNES and PS1 version, another one that was previously exclusive to a phone app is included as well and the one new side-story is written by Ryukishi07 (Higurashi, Umineko) who's a self-proclaimed fan of Kamaitachi no Yoru.
Last but not least, the new character art; It's the biggest departure from the old games and I agree with the Famitsu reviews that it has its pros and cons. It's definitely more in line with other current VNs and I didn't mind the change as much as I thought I would; You get used to it pretty quickly. The backgrounds still largely consist of photos that were taken on location (they look very similar to the old ones, but I think they took all-new photos for this game), at times the photos are pretty stylized or painted over. They still sometimes clash a bit with the anime character art though.
Here's a couple of spoiler-free screencaps from the opening chapter, compared to the same scenes from the 1994 original:
The flow-chart is spoiler-free, you only see the scenes you've already completed on it:
Overall, the game feels like a fresh take on a classic VN that both newcomers and long-time fans can enjoy.
I hope that unlike previous games, it will get a proper localization now that the genre has grown in popularity.
