Shuten Order review: "The Danganronpa creator's new multi-genre mystery feels like a forgotten DS cult classic I would have been obsessed with"

Shuten Order opens with a bizarre sight: pieces of a dismembered body tumbling from the sky alongside a heavenly chorus. What makes things even more bizarre is, somehow, this is your body, and the only one who can solve the murder is you, guided by a pair of hands-off, business-like angels and the power to tap into an ability called the 'power of god'. For mystery game fans like me, it's a catnip set-up.

Playing as Rei Shimobe, you've lost all memories thanks to inhabiting what the angels call a temporary body. With only days until it turns to ash, she's got to figure out who killed her, get them to confess, and then kill that person in order to achieve full resurrection. Not being able to remember how you died is one thing, but the insular city of Shuten is a strange place that defies expectation as it is. Home to the titular Shuten Order, a strange cult-like religion counting down the days to humanity's extinction, every street corner and home is filled with countdown clocks as this world draws closer to the end. What's weirder? Rei discovers she is actually the Founder of the whole thing, and that one of the five ministers who ran the city alongside her is likely the culprit.

Which means that quite quickly you get the option to have Rei investigate one of five routes, each exploring its own different mystery game sub-genre that you're locked into until the short scenario is cleared. It's an ambitious idea, and at times wonderfully creative, but one that results – as you'd expect – in a somewhat splintered experience. While for genre sickos like myself it's an interesting approach, it's hard to recommend for newcomers, which can feel oddly contrary to how simplistic each route can feel.

Pulp cover

Developed by Tookyo Games alongside DMM Games, and helmed by Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka, Shuten Order has some serious credentials that by themselves tantalize sleuths. (The studio also released the extremely good The Hundred Line earlier this year – how do they do it?). There's a lot of genre veterans on staff and it shows, given how effortlessly Shuten Order is able to pull together different gameplay styles. Shuten Order might not get as deep as I'd like into any one, but it means that in its best moments it can feel like a cross-genre celebration of all the types of mystery gaming out there.

The presentation too is gorgeous – colorful, highly stylized character designs mixing together with dialogue presented in a comic-like style to make the most out of what seems to be a tight budget. Inexplicably, a handful of scenes allow you to control Rei against pre-rendered backgrounds to investigate parts of an environment, while at other times she looks around in first-person. It's a smart approach that means Shuten Order feels simultaneously lo-fi alongside having great art direction – making me think more than a few times of The World Ends With You – resulting in an experience that feels like I should be hunched over a Nintendo DS instead of a Nintendo Switch, and I mean that with flowers.

Early into each route, though, Rei will end up in a jam that requires calling on the power of Revelation. In short, God answers by literally bestowing her with game mechanics, changing Rei's perspective to match our own in a way that suits the narrative requirements of each storyline. It's meta but it works, and the reveal of what I'd be in for each time I picked a new route to tackle always made me smile.

But, they definitely aren't all made equal. The one that riffs pretty clearly on Ace Attorney is a standout, throwing you into the middle of a contested will and a family all desperate for money, and having to solve a sequence of murders in the process – with many ludicrous but thrilling leaps in logic required to make clues fit together. Here, Revelation allows Rei to snap her fingers to literally add evidence to a casefile she can somehow view in her mind. It's here that the mechanical twist best fits alongside the narrative in order to enhance the way you interact with the story. Even so, it's still lightweight compared to actual Ace Attorney, with enough margin of error that you never really have to worry about blundering your deductions too much.

It's a problem that echoes throughout each route in Shuten Order. Though the game is quite lengthy overall (taking me 30 hours to get to the proper end), each route itself takes about five hours to complete – pretty breezy for something so narrative heavy. In essence, it means you have about five vertical slices of a different style of game, all without the room to really flesh anything out.

Shuten Order's killing game escape room route, for instance, has a wonderfully creative metatextual layer that incorporates the VTuber mastermind's streaming overlay into the game itself – Rei literally being able to see the comments the streamer is making as she progresses. Yet, that only really boils down to her being able to overhear a few hints in very simplistic dialogue choices, with the rest of it revolving around dull first-person dungeon navigation and extremely basic puzzles like fitting Tetris-like shapes into holes of sliding tiles around to complete a picture.

Likewise, another route gloriously tips its cap to legendary dating sim Tokimeki Memorial by incorporating similar UI-quirks to navigation. But, again, it ultimately has very little impact on the otherwise quite linear story, elements like bomb-clocks on conversational partners are easily ignorable for the most part, even if it does add texture that helps to set its own narrative apart.

The plot thickens

It's a shame, as when Shuten Order embraces the non-linearity of its storytelling concept that it best shines. Needless to say, though you must pick one of five routes at the beginning, in reality you have to play them all to figure out what really happened. While each route has a conclusion to its own plot, they all end on a hook to the wider mystery that'll keep you wanting to play on once you've shunted back to make a new decision.

The true nature of your murder and of the titular group and its city are revealed through constant teasing clues across each, and the fact you can play them in any order means what information you have to make your own personal deductions could vary wildly. As you progress, you even have a unified list of clues pertaining to your murder that you can browse at any time, growing your understanding of the real murder mystery even as you end up sidetracked by each strange scenario.

There's a really great sinister edge underneath each too – such as, when cornered, Rei has no choice but to sometimes call on the Power of God for protection with unpredictably explosively violent results that immediately begin to sow doubts as to just who you should be trusting in this strange, futuristic city. Caught between one group praying for humanity's end and another that treats life just as lightly, should you even be chasing revival at all?

While everything does eventually come together, what's perhaps pitched as a victory lap through what came before ends up a bit of a slog, spending an incredibly long time reiterating what you already figured out.

Even so, piecing together the larger mystery and making your own deductions can be rewarding. Especially as the world of the Shuten Order is quite so bizarre, getting to grip on its own logic and beginning to think on its level is satisfying. And some of the outlandish murder plots in the Ace Attorney-styled route have to be seen to be believed. I just wish this genre celebration was more worth celebrating on its own.

Dying becomes a skill in this JRPG from the Danganronpa devs, and its Steam Next Fest demo is already Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam