Developer: Izanagi Games
Publisher: NIS America
Genre: Shoot-Em-Up, Visual Novel, and Escape Room
Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
Also Available For: PlayStation 4, PC, Nintendo Switch
If there’s one thing I really love about the current state of video games, it’s how much more willing developers seem to be to take risks and experiment with mashing together genres that don’t seem like they should go together. The best part is, a lot of these experiments work, more or less – when a weird little genre-mixing game isn’t great, it’s usually more a function of flaws in the smaller details of the design rather than an outright incompatibility in the way the development team blended things. Such games can still be enjoyable, of course, but they often leave one disappointed to some degree. Unfortunately, that’s kind of where I’m at with Yurukill: The Calumniation Games.
As a mix between bullet-hell shoot-em-ups and murder/mystery visual novels such as Zero Escape or Danganronpa, I went into Yurukill expecting to enjoy the visual novel segments much more than the shoot-em-up segments; I’ve never really been into shoot-em-ups, preferring to get my projectile purgatories elsewhere. Oddly enough, I found the opposite to be true – in playing this game, I’ve developed a bit of a taste for shmups while being disappointed with the story and puzzles in this title.
The premise of Yurukill is that five teams of people have been selected to take part in a twisted game on an island theme park known as Yurukill Land. Each team consists of one prisoner, a convicted criminal (or two, in the case of one team) who insists they have been falsely accused and an executioner, who is in some way a victim of the prisoner’s supposed crime. The teams are told they must survive a series of trials and compete against one another to decide a winning team, of which the prisoner shall be exonerated and the executioner shall have their wish granted. It’s an admittedly strong start, but the plot starts to fall apart around roughly the story’s halfway mark.
One of the biggest problems is that the cast is immediately split up into their teams, with one chapter of focus given to each of them on their own. It’s a decent set-up, but the thing about ensemble casts is that in order for them to really work there needs to be time given to the character’s interactions with and development relative to each other, something which Yurukill never really does. Even once the characters are all reunited, almost no time is spent showing how they all interact with one another – for that matter, most of the characters are relegated to side-roles after their own chapter is over with. The worst part is that this isn’t really all that much of a loss – I didn’t find the characters believable, and many of their big character moment speeches were complete non sequiturs. By the end, even the broader plot is highly logically inconsistent, to the point where even a couple weeks after beating it I still keep realizing “wait that aspect of it doesn’t make sense” about various pieces of the puzzle.
When not sitting through contrived visual novel sequences, the player is tasked with escape room style puzzles that also leave much to be desired. These escape rooms are very straightforward, with a relatively low number of actual puzzles which swing wildly between being insultingly easy and being absolute moon logic or even following a reasonable logic path but coming to a conclusion at the end of it that is utterly bizarre. There’s absolutely no difficulty curve, with the spikes and dips in puzzle design happening completely at random.
At the very least, the shmup portion of the game is a bit of a saving grace. As I said earlier, I don’t have much experience with the genre, so I’m probably not the best judge of whether a shoot-em-up is well designed or made, but it seemed fine to me. Though a bit difficult in places, I don’t think any of the attack patterns are unfair, and mowing down waves of enemies or picking your way through teeny tiny gaps in the walls of lead unscathed is satisfying.
On the other hand, the justification for why there are shooting game segments in this visual novel is about as absurd as anything else the game does. They’re presented as VR (though the game calls it “BR”, standing for “Brain Reality”, if you want to get nit-picky) trials, debates between the prisoners and their executioners where the prisoners argue their innocence so as not to be executed. In gameplay terms, this manifests as occasionally having to present pieces of evidence that in some way cast doubt on the events of their “crime” as previously understood in a way that reminds me of Danganronpa – indeed, Yurukill feels in many ways like a Danganronpa wannabe, even down to its title being a mashup of the words “Yurusu” (Japanese for “pardon”) and “Kill” in the same vein as Danganronpa’s title meaning “bullet refutation/rebuttal”. Fortunately, the game does come with a score attack mode that allows the player to indulge in the shoot-em-up without dealing with the story elements, but you do have to clear the story before that is wholly unlocked.
While I respect Yurukill: The Calumniation Games’ ambition as a genre mash-up, the fact of the matter is that at least half of the game falls flat. That being the case, I can’t recommend it solely on its merits as a shmup – especially given my unfamiliarity with the genre. While I can’t say for absolute certain there are better examples, mechanically, of the genre out there, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. Again, this is not to say its shooting game is bad, I enjoyed it somewhat, but you can probably find better, more rewarding experiences in that regard.
Yurukill's story is full of holes to a degree which makes suspension of disbelief difficult, and the gameplay alone is not strong enough to carry the title by itself.
