Some spoilers ahead for well… a game that isn’t really worth a spoiler alert anyways.

Happy Halloween everyone! Let’s talk about a game that tries to be dark and scary but really isn’t.

I’m a bit of a niche gamer. Outside of the thousands of hours I spend mindlessly clicking away at the Sisyphian task of playing League of Legends and other esport titles, I generally have a taste for very unpopular genres, usually surrounding arcade culture but not always. Rhythm games, shoot ‘em ups, visual novels, doujin media as a whole, you get me, read my previous articles.

So when a friend of mine mentioned in 2021 that there was an upcoming game that would have escape room elements like Zero Escape, a mystery visual novel component like Danganronpa, and most importantly a full arcade-style shmup alongside the story, I was instantly hyped. For a company to even put effort into an arcade shmup in the 2020s is already against the grain, and judging from the other promotional material, Yurukill: The Calumniation Games, developed by IzanagiGames and G.rev was looking to be a game I would both enjoy as a puzzling story and as a way to challenge myself as a shmup player.

When it finally came out in the middle of Summer 2022, I immediately picked it up and streamed my entire playthrough on Twitch. I had fun for sure, but the game could only make me feel lukewarm in the end. If you don’t care so much about these genres, it’s not solidly a bad game, but considering what else is out there and what it was hyped up to be, it let me down in almost every way and even made me a bit frustrated about the sad state of the genres I love so much.

Everything I can say about Yurukill can pretty much be split into three segments, which I will discuss separately since I would say they don’t really interact with each other that much in-game. Those would be the story/characters/art, the non-shmup gameplay, and the shmup gameplay. 

The story of Yurukill is essentially that eleven random people get abducted and taken to some giant amusement park to play a death game. The significance of these people is that they’re organized into pairs – (in one of them, it’s two twins paired with someone else) – where one person has been falsely accused of a crime, and the other person is their supposed victim. The victims are given the power to kill their partner at any time, as they move through escape rooms and other trials in an attempt to prove the innocence of the accused, and gain the forgiveness of the victim. 

It’s a good concept in theory, but forcing that into a death game was clearly not compatible. Despite being advertised as being a dark and twisted game like Danganronpa, here’s a real spoiler – NO ONE DIES. After a while, you forget that this game was even supposed to involve death, except for when you yourself die and an extra-cheesy Game Over screen reminds you what blood looks like. There is also an attempt to build up a whole mystery about who the “culprit” who runs the game truly is, and the result is pretty much exactly what you’d expect; I won’t even spoil this one.

The way it’s written made it really hard to care. Each character, minus arguably the two MCs, are pretty much all walking tropes, and do surprisingly little to actually reveal any personality underneath. The game just doesn’t give any chances for anything other than the main story arc – no out-of-pocket drama or dumb humour, just serious bickering the whole time. I genuinely can’t remember a single memorable line whether it be impactful or comedic.

Overall, the story feels like a highly watered down amalgamation of things inspired from the games that came before it, to the point where it just straight up doesn’t inspire excitement. There is no brutality, no true uninhibited expressions of emotion, no mindblowing twist. It just doesn’t happen, even if I keep hoping for it.

The visual aspects of the game, both in the visual novel and in the shmup sections, were admittedly quite well done. The character designs were fresh and detailed for some of them, though for the most part they were a little bit too conventionally attractive. Unfortunately, the story ends up making the characters feel way too soulless and uninteresting to care about, and it kind of feels like they were only made to look cool so that people would simp over them and write fanfics. But realistically it’s probably just that the art and voice team did a good job and the writers did not. Notably, Binko the hostess, who is kinda cool in a vacuum, is really just a sad attempt to take Monokuma from Danganronpa and turn him into a hot kitsune girl. Also, the music is not notable in any way. Moving on.

The non-shmup gameplay involves escape rooms that involve various puzzles and riddles, as well as a couple other segments that involve selecting quiz questions or dialogue options, sometimes with big stakes, sometimes not. The escape rooms were well-executed in the first chapter or so, but then took a really big nosedive. Unlike the iconic escape rooms of Zero Escape, it just felt like after the first room, mostly everything felt linear and obvious. Few things were interactive or even clickable, answers were pretty much spoon-fed to us, and sometimes the room design didn’t even have anything to do with the story. Sad and boring.

Some of the non-escape room segments also included a mini-murder mystery, some high-stakes puzzles where you Game Over if wrong, and most notably the Maji-Kill sequence where the victim person threatens to press your kill button and you have to talk your way out. That one is legitimately embarrassing from the devs. It’s one of the most obvious and shoehorned ways to artificially build up tension by making the pointless “Urge to Kill” gauge rise even when you choose the correct answer, along with intensified music and red bloody colors, even if the answers are blindingly obvious. Anyone knowing how games work could easily see through that.

Another thing when playing through the story is that there are segments interspersed between shmup mini-stages where you have to pick through pieces of evidence and answer quiz questions to prove your innocence (like in Danganronpa) which is cool and all (it’s actually kind of cringe), but if you pick wrong, it costs you your remaining lives in the shmup section. I died many times to that since I was playing the shmup on Hell difficulty, and it got really annoying to go through all that talking again just to progress further. But also, that’s kind of a skill issue on my part. 

Basically, there wasn’t really that much non-shmup gameplay to make the visual novel interactive, which made engaging with the story quite a dull experience.

On to the shmup. If I knew my audience were shmup nerds, I would probably elaborate on this endlessly but chances are that you aren’t, and I don’t really want to spend that much effort anyways.

The shmup was genuinely pretty decent. Having been designed by G.rev, a studio made up of people who have worked on famous arcade shmups like G-Darius, Border Down, and Strania, they certainly knew what they were doing. Stage designs were generally creative and fresh, and boss designs were visually impressive and also had patterns that made you use the screen to its full potential. There’s generally two big gripes I had with the shmup, the latter of which was not really the fault of G.rev.

The first thing is that there wasn’t really a high-potential scoring system. One of the biggest motivations for playing shmups, which are about repetition and mastery of a short game, is to gradually push the score higher as one improves. Without going into too much detail, the scoring system in Yurukill was alright, but relied too heavily on milking and timing out bosses, which ended up getting quite repetitive and didn’t really feel like improvement. It didn’t feel like there was some kind of untapped potential to push things beyond what seemed obvious.

I got a certificate and a glass for placing 13th in a Yurukill scoring contest held by the devs, lol.

The second thing was that it felt like it couldn’t really decide on whether the players should be focusing on full game runs, or individual stages. In my opinion, this is more of a problem with how the game was paced out story-wise. The game has 7 stages, each of which were played along with the 7 chapters of the story – but each stage is split into 3 sub-stages, each with their own boss. All told, each stage takes at least 8 minutes to clear; more if you are aiming for score. That makes a full game run easily over 70 minutes, which is simply unnatural for an arcade style shmup. The pacing does feel artificially dragged out in order to encourage score attacks on individual stages, but unfortunately the viability of full game runs suffers as a result.

There was one truly egregious stain of a stage as a result of this, which was stage 6. Stage 6 is awful in every single way. As soon as you enter the stage, there aren’t any of the amazing backgrounds and effects zooming past you or any terrain to look out for – it’s literally a static image. I cannot stress this enough – the entire rest of the game has intricate visual landscapes, and this one has absolutely nothing. The gameplay design is also even worse than you could imagine – it’s literally a boss rush that rehashes the patterns of previous bosses except MUCH more difficult. The final pattern of Stage 6 is quite literally impossible; I had to repeatedly die and spam bombs to get past it. The game could have done without Stage 6, but hey, it was demanded by the story to keep things consistent, so there it is just ruining any hope of me doing full game runs.

So all those words of complaint were just to say that I felt a little bit betrayed and let down by the whole ordeal. It definitely felt worse after playing than while I was playing – because I was just thinking “that’s it?” without any more hope of anything that would genuinely blow my mind and make the game memorable. If Danganronpa is for teenagers, then this game is for elementary schoolers. At least the funny spaceships go pew pew, which makes my brain a little happy among the rest of this gigantic disappointment.