It took me the better part of a year to finish this 8 hour game, and there's a reason for it. Yurukill is a game of two halves; a really basic and mid bullet hell, and some simple linear escape room puzzles intersperced with the worst mystery novel I've read.

This game's story is the main pull, and its easily the worst part of the game. The twist is ridiculously obvious and not surprising. The dialogue is dry as hell, the stakes are way too low and softball for a killing game in an amusement park. I kept waiting for the plot to take off and it didn't.

Fans of bullet hell games will think its mid, repetitive and horribly paced shooter. Danganronpa or Zero Escape fans will hate the derivative, predictable, plodding plot. Yurukill isn't a disaster, it just misses both of its demographics by spreading itself too thin.

Its a short, boring adventure with an ass pull cornball happy ending. The shmup sections are distractingly hideous as the icing on the cake. The best parts are the character designs, some of the dialogue and Binko's tryhard voice acting. It's like putting a marashino cherry on a cake made of sawdust and and duct sealant. To further elaborate; it's not fucking important.

A novel take on the "death game" genre (what if prisoners were forced to work together with the people they had supposedly wronged, who held their life in their hands?), combining escape room puzzles with bullet hell segments. It's a fairly well-acted, tense game, and we love the bumbling detective duo that find themselves pushed into the action? But since this is from the person behind Kakegurui, we were hoping for something a little wilder. Compared to a game like Danganronpa, Yurukill can be downright kind RE: the dangers each character faces, and that feels a bit weird! Still, we had a pretty decent time with this one.

Sadly mid as hell despite the strength of the premise and gestures in more interesting directions - feels oddly undercooked for something with around 2-3years development time so far as I can gather. Carried along by the strength of the presentation (shout out Hiro Kiyahara for some v cool but not overworked character designs and Izanagi Games for genuinely impressive spritework), performances of the voice cast (Yu Kobayashi giving it 200% as Binko the easy MVP), and G.Rev, but the VN mystery/death game portion feels like a minimal effort first draft and the shmup segments, while occasionally gorgeous for the least interesting segments, are solid but unexceptional. Would be interested to see a sequel that develops some of the ideas here further tbh.

Full video review: https://youtu.be/5rwvTochc5M

Okay so I just finished this game and I have to admit, I am very confused. Not as to what happened in the game - that part I got down - but rather, what exactly this game was setting out to do.

Gameplay
Yurukill is basically a hybrid of two genres: visual novel and shoot ‘em up. You’re probably thinking “wow, what a cool combination, how does it work?” and the answer is simply “it doesn’t”. Or rather, the genre combination itself is fine, it’s just that it is entirely unnecessary. I went through the entire game thinking that these shoot ‘em up segments would have some sort of deeper meaning or bigger story payoff rather than being a shoot ‘em up minigame tacked on to a visual novel, but nope, it is literally just that.

Not to say that that shoot ‘em up stuff was entirely bad though. I mean, it wasn’t good, but it at least wasn’t terrible. The movement is fine, the models are… okay I guess, and the bullet patterns are at least challenging at times. You get a handful of different ships and a bunch of different bosses to take down, so content-wise the variety isn’t that bad either given the game’s length.

Each chapter of the game has one of these shoot ‘em up sequences at the end and they all follow the same pattern: shoot down a bunch of enemies, take down a boss, answer a question regarding the case at hand, take down boss again, repeat until the end where you have to answer questions about that story chapter in a Danganronpa-style minigame. The answers are almost always obvious and oftentimes feel like an insult to my intelligence though, which, when combined with other aspects of the game, give me the impression that this was a game designed for a much younger audience - younger so than the Danganronpa series that it blatantly tries to emulate.

Story
Just like the shoot ‘em up gameplay, the story is not terrible, but it’s even further from good than that gameplay is. It started out fine: you’re thrown into this death game scenario where each character has some sort of crime they were falsely accused of and winning the game allows them the opportunity to clear their name. Each story chapter follows one of these individual mysteries, giving you time to process each as they come before becoming this larger thing towards the end of the game.

It’s methodical, but not in a good way. The game’s pacing during each of these is a bit too quick to really give the characters the development they need and I often found myself disappointed at how simple the mysteries turned out to be. Oftentimes, I would go into a case with a vague guess of what happened and the result wouldn’t even be that far off - it isn’t like Ace Attorney or Danganronpa where there’s so much more to it and you’re constantly left guessing right up to the end.

There just isn’t a lot of depth here and this is best exemplified with the ending. Yeah, I mean it does wrap things up, but it just goes straight to the point and there’s nothing really special about it to set itself apart from the rest of the genre. Maybe I was setting myself up for disappointment here by hoping that the ending would pull some massive twist or development to really elevate the whole experience beyond the mediocrity that was the rest of the story, but nope, it does not stray from the formula at all.

Choices
There is no branching plot here and usually if you pick the “wrong” choice, you get a line of dialogue saying “no, that can’t be right” before the game throws you back to the decision screen to pick the correct one. Illusion of choice is a common problem with visual novels, so this is expected to a degree, but when it is literally every decision you can make, it does become a bit annoying.

Length
The game took me around 14-ish hours to clear. Not long by VN standards for sure, but at least not insultingly short. Granted, the game could have definitely used maybe double that length to flesh out the characters a bit more and make the mysteries more than these surface level things.

Puzzles
There is some additional gameplay through point-and-click-style puzzles, like what you would expect from an escape room. Whether that be some sort of riddle, cypher, sliding puzzle, or matching puzzle - the game covers a lot of ground there and these do help in making the experience a bit more immersive in a way.

Granted, at the same time, I can’t say that any of these puzzles are particularly difficult and I only ever needed to use the hint feature for two of them across the entire experience - so again, this leads me back to my belief that this game is aimed at a much younger audience.

Options
This is a visual novel that completely lacks any sort of skip button, a text speed option, and an auto mode speed option. It is extremely light on the settings and missing some key options I would consider essential in any visual novel.

Art and Music
I almost got all the way through this review without mentioning the art and music - two areas that the game does a decent job at, the art specifically. I liked the character models and the unique art style that the game goes for outside of that anime norm - which is especially noticeable in the eyes. The music, while not quite as good, at least is not bad and escapes that VN pitfall of being overly repetitive and obnoxious.

Overall
Yurukill: The Calumniation Games is both not a good visual novel and not a good shoot ‘em up game. The combination of these two feels forced and leaves me wondering what the game was trying to be. While the art may be good and the point-and-click stuff is fine, the entirety of the story just falls flat and feels like a watered down version of Danganronpa and the like. The genre has far better options than this, so I cannot in good faith recommend it and only hope that the studio can deliver us something even cooler in the future - they clearly have a unique style, they just need to match that with a good story.

If YURUKILL has million number of fans I am one of them.

If YURUKILL has ten fans I am one of them.

If YURUKILL has only one fan and that is me. If YURUKILL has no fans, that means I am no longer on earth.

If the world against the YURUKILL , I am against the world.

There are a lot of mixed feelings for this game.

Story:
Overall I liked the story, however, I did feel that the game tried to limit story elements to each chapter instead (instead of interconnected chapter revelations), making story twists feel less important. I also feel that the story should have been longer for more impacting twists and a deeper impact on the player.

Characters:
I think there was a diverse set of fun characters, with good voice acting.

puzzle:
I am puzzled how to rate this section, I did need help with some puzzles and they were not that interesting, however, they do help build up an atmosphere/feeling which they did well.

touhou gameplay:
The Touhou gameplay felt good and complimented story time well, however, it was not the best part of the game.

P.S. The ending music is amazing: 20/10

Yurukill is a unique mix of Visual Novel, Bullet Hell shoot-em up and Escape Room game. Each aspect is solid, but aren't particularly amazing. That said, I thought it was a decent package overall.

The story is interesting even though it's fairly predictable. For a mystery story, it wasn't particularly complex with multiple layers or even many plot twists. Instead, it's surprisingly straightforward.

You'll understand 80% of the mystery by just the halfway point of the game. For what's it's worth, the resolution was solid and it ended on a high note while leaving a small hook for a possible sequel.

The characters aren't anything amazing and could even be described as tropey most of the time. That said, they are mostly surprisingly likable characters with a decent amount of depth.

Most of the gameplay loop starts with the Escape Room portion then shoot em up portion. The Escape Room as expected is full of puzzles to solve. They range from shockingly simple to some pretty difficult ones. Each puzzle gives you three hints that you can use anytime you want. There's no penalty on using them and they can be very helpful if you get stuck. For some puzzles, the final hint practically spells out the answer.

The shoot em up portion is an odd addition to a VN/Puzzle game, but there's a rationale for it in the story, as strangely as it is. The gameplay itself is fun and a bit difficult at times as par of the genre. In between the shoot em stages within the same chapter are the deduction phases where you need to use evidence to support a claim. I found this part to be tricky in an otherwise straightforward game. It's not always clear what the answer is which is annoying since every wrong answer causes you to lose 3 lives. On Normal, I lost more lives on these portions than the actual shoot em up portion.

The Visual Novel parts accounted for about 60% of the game which included the Escape Room puzzle portions. The shoot em up portion is about 40%.

The soundtrack particularly the shoot em up sections were great.

The VN presentation is pretty decent with the characters designs/sprites being a large standout.

Overall, the game was fun and the story was interesting enough to keep me engaged. It's not a long game though and it took me only 11 hours to clear the game. 10 if I didn't get a game over on one level and had to restart from the beginning of the shoot em up phase.

I would really like to enjoy Yurukill. The batshit idea of a Escape room adventure visual novel crossed with a Shooting game, with the former being written by some guy who wrote a manga about getting off to gambling, and the latter being developed by STG veterans G.Rev. It sounds stupid enough to work.

And y'know, it actually does. Replacing what would be for instance, a trial in a danganronpa game with a STG sequence intercut with answering questions and minor deduction that kinda works really well? The flashiness and flow of a Shmup battle actually works well with the heightened emotion of these sequences, as each prisoner tries to prove their innocence/why they deserve to live to their victims. It's a bit wonky and certaintly contrived in the flow of the story, but its where the game's best moments are.

And the STG segments themselves are decent. It's certaintly not G.Rev's best, and suffers from a severe case of being an extremely bland shooting game in it's own right, but I feel that was also definetly the point, to keep the shooting simple as an accompaniment to the story rather than the main focus.

Well, shame the Adventure/VN side of the game completely lets the side down. It's remarkably dissapointing and feels bizzarely rushed for a game that's been in development for a game that was announced in 2019. The first chapter is good, focusing on our two main protagonists, with lightining fast pacing and a good conflict.

But the cracks show. The rest of the "Prisoner confronts Victim" stories are pretty ok, albeit quite repeitive and really fail to inject much jeopardy into what's ostensibly a death game, but it's after that where things really fall apart. Two chapters of blatant filler are the most egregious, with cases and mysteries that barely tie into the core plot, what i'm sure is actually a straight up plot hole in one of them and pointless padding in the other, and a final chapter with an utterly pathetc resolution to the game's crimes and plotlines that leaves an incredibly sour taste in the mouth. Imagine if the mastermind of Danganronpa just came out with this and that was all you got. The game builds up to what feels like should be some dramatic untangling and it's so fucking shit.

And whilst many of those individual chapters especially in the first half arent neccessarily worse than the first, the game's poor tendancies in the adventure sections really begin to dig in. The puzzles pendulum between either being the easiest things on the planet or requiring some pretty ridiculous leaps of logic with basically no middle ground, there's no CGs or even moving character sprites for most of the game leaving a lot of stuff very abstract and making a lot of the more climactic moments feel very weird, and one of the 5 character pairs' contribution to the narrative is so bizzarely pointless and throwaway I legitimately don't know why they're in the game. I think it's meant to be comic relief but it honestly reads more like characters that were left in the first draft that dont have any contribution to the plot. By the end I was glad it was at least short - barely 9 hours.

And in the end, despite the strength of the shmup argument extravaganzas, there just feels like there's so little reason to bother with it. The Adventure part lets the side down too hard to care, and the STG side whilst is fine, but also mid as fuck and outclassed so handily by G.rev themselves on every platform you can buy this game that you have no reason to bother.

There are sparks in Yurukill. Moments which really hit, strong emotional beats in dramatic boss battles, and I really like that this game's equivelent of monokuma is just an overworked tour guide. But the end result is super dissapointing and not worth your time and money. I haven't been this dissapointed with a VN since Zero Time Dilemma, and at least that was a beautiful train crash.