So Danganronpa S was finally ported to PC, PS4, and IOS on the 21st of July, so as a big fan of the series I bought it excited to see what the game had to offer. If you couldn’t tell by the title, I’m pretty disappointed and have lost some respect for Spike Chunsoft for this “attempted” title within the series. There was a moment in time when Danganronpa was honestly my favourite game series and my old Steam profile kinda reflected that as I was not subtle about it in the slightest. But with the release of Danganronpa S, I thought I would be able to go down memory lane and go back to the series that I held to such a high standard after not touching it since 2017. But after spending around 80 hours on the game, I’m here to give my opinion on why this game is such a pathetic excuse of a cash grab by Spike.

I’m going to lay out the problems I have with Dangannronpa S, first I will be talking about the port itself, second the story, then the gameplay, the biggest issue with the game, Spike Chunsoft, and finally my conclusion.

Game port

With the announcement that Danganronpa S would be coming to Steam, I added it to my wishlist and would track the days that would pass until the day of release. However, even before Danganronpa S was released there was an issue, I like to think this was the universe foreshadowing the mess I was about to experience. See now Danganronpa S was listed as being released on the 21st, but when it was the 20th, Steam updated the countdown to how the game would release in x hours. However, when the countdown had reached zero around 1am GMT, the time the game was supposed to come out, Steam simply said the product was “coming soon” and it wasn’t until 3am that the game was actually made available. I can’t speak for the PlayStation store or AppStore but I’m going to assume something similar happened just because I doubt this was a Steam issue as I’ve had games actually release when that count down reaches zero on Steam in the past.

Regardless of the issues with the release, someone call Gonta because the bugs that are present within the port of this game cannot be ignored. The first of which are the loading times, this problem seems to be affecting pretty much every single person. When I boot up the game the loading time is ridiculous, the total time for the game to boot took me two and half minutes. This isn’t for the initial installation either but every time you want to play the game. Now I like to think my PC is quite good and considering the game is only 2GB in size and isn’t that demanding, I think this just reflects bad coding. Now I ain’t a coder and again I don’t know about the PS4 or IOS, but this issue is affecting more or less every single person all in differing degrees on Steam. I’ve read some people haven’t even been able to bypass the loading screen albeit loading for 30+ minutes. Once again, before you even play the game it is a shitstorm.

But let’s say you are one of the lucky ones who can bypass the loading screen, the second bug makes the game unplayable by making the entire map void. Luckily I haven’t experienced this bug myself but apparently, it is somewhat common and no rebooting or uninstalling and then reinstalling the game fixes it. The third bug which I haven’t seen talked about but I’ve had it happen to me twice now was having my character get stuck while traversing the map which requires rebooting the game. And once again, when you have a game where the loading times are a minimum of two minutes, it can be a fucking nightmare to continue even trying to play the game with all these bugs. Finally, I didn’t realise this issue until I began writing this review, but on the Steam version of the game, you can’t restart your progress. Like the game has an inbuilt saving system where even if your game crashes mid-development mode, once you launch the game it will remember the last place you were. But the problem is that can’t reset your progress, meaning once you have finished the game you’re done. This inhibits all replayability in the future for those who actually enjoy the game or want to see the story episodes. Though I imagine this population would be a minority when you look at the actual gameplay.

Edit: so on the 27th there was a patch released which has drastically reduced the time of loading screens so this bug is fixed now. Although I’m happy for this fix, it still reflects badly on the game as it brings into question why this bug was so prevalent to begin with, let alone why it took almost a week after release to fix. Not to mention why users were required to change the configuration on their computer settings in order to fix the issue.

Gameplay

If you’re familiar with the development plan from V3 then you’ll be very familiar with Danganronpa S as it’s more or less a carbon copy. Both games have you select a character where you roll a die to move around the board landing on varying panels. You have growth panels that provide you xp to level up, talent panels to gain talent fragments that let you learn skills, event panels that boost your stats, friendship panels that allow you to see character interactions, battle panels where you fight mobs, card panels that provide cards, and a shop panels where you can buy cards, armour, and weapons. The goal of the development mode is to level up characters as high as possible so they can help you in battle mode. The save of your character after development mode can then be transferred and can fight mobs in the despair tower. And that ladies and gentlemen is everything you can to do in this game, once again can I remind you this game is £18.

Like I said, this is just a carbon copy of the development plan from V3, and considering there was a four-year gap between these two modes you would expect that Spike would have further developed the development mode or fleshed it out by incorporating new features or just anything new, but at last they didn’t. The only difference between V3 and S’s development mode is S has some of the characters from ultra despair girls and the board takes place on Jabberwok island. Other than that everything is the same, they have the same skills, the same equipment, the same music, the same mobs, etc. The only thing they don’t share is S decided to remove the interactive dungeon crawling gameplay in V3 and replace it with a tower where you have to manually select to enter a floor every single time. And this segways into one of the biggest gripes I have with that the game in that everything is rehashed, there is barely any new content. Around 95% of the game is just reused assets from previous games, honestly, if you showed me the game and told me that it was fanmade I would believe you as there is barely anything new. The only new things are the swimsuit sprites, a few backgrounds, and a few CGs, everything else is reused which is just utterly lazy. Seriously you’d think after a decade and in the hopefully final Danganronpa product they would make official Mukuro sprites, but no they just ripped the sprites from Danganronpa one.

While we are talking about the sprites, I need to highlight the inconsistency even within the new sprites. It’s been said enough that Chiaki’s, Akane’s, Peko’s, and Angie's swimsuit sprites are lazy as they are reusing assets from previous games and don’t get me wrong I do agree with this sentiment. But I do also think it is a nice call back for the former three outfits as they were only briefly shown in Danganronpa two. But instead, my issue is if you are going to make reference by reusing the swimsuits worn in Danganronpa two, then why doesn’t this apply to Sonia? I understand the whole wetsuit was used for humour to troll Soda but in Danganronpa two, Sonia shows to be conscientious of her skin so why make a brand new swimsuit for her in S if we are already going to be reusing assets? You can even expand this exact point with Soda in that in Danganronpa two, it’s made clear that he’s wearing a camo speedo, but yet this asset is also completely ignored. I understand this would be considered nitpicking so I will just give one last discrepancy in the form of the cover art for Danganronpa S. Just from this one image there are three issues, the first being Junko, look at her swimsuit, this swimsuit does not appear in the game at all.. Next then is Komaru, once again this is not the swimsuit she wears in the game. The final one then is Togami, why does he have abs in this image when his sprites in-game have nothing close to resembling abs? It’s these discrepancies that just reflect how little effort was actually put into the game. This segways into the next topic of one of the few original and new things of the game, and that is the story.

Story

Again Danganronpa’s S’s story is somewhat similar to the V3’s development mode as the goal is to help boost their talents, though S deviates from V3 by first having the training take set on Jabberwok island through the neoworld programme. There is also the emphasis on the social collaboration between other ultimate students as well as family which explains why Komaru and Hiroko show up. The goal then is for everyone to collect hope fragments in order to graduate, however, Monokuma is also present where he must also train his despairing techniques. As such Monokuma summons a bunch of mobs and monobeasts to cause chaos among the cast to explain why battles will take place within the simulation. But after the prologue, the story becomes as formulaic as a morning cartoon with each episode having one of the monokubs abuse their administrative power to please their own wants which requires the cast to defeat them and then collecting their hope fragment. The only exception was in episode four where you don’t even battle Monophanie but just let her vent about her problems with her siblings and this is enough to grant her her hope fragment. Honestly, for the price you pay, these episodes are extremely short and underwhelming with each episode lasting around ten minutes. As a result, there’s no foundation to even take the monokubs insecurities seriously, and considering the time it takes to unlock each episode, this only makes the matter worst. Side note though, considering that the Danganronpa series strives for continuity between titles, why are Hifumi, Teruteru, and Toko excluded from episode fives selection? For those unaware, episode five teleports characters that have siblings into Monotaro’s room to help deal with his issue. I could understand why Toko would be ignored since her half-sister died shortly after birth so she wouldn’t have had that sibling relationship, but based on canon knowledge, both Hifumi and Teruteru have siblings so why are they just left ignored?

But even when you do finally complete all five episodes, you unlock the final episode named graduation. Now I will talk about it a bit later on, but again I know this game isn’t supposed to be taken super seriously, but considering the potential of having the whole Danganronpa cast from all previous titles come together to go anywhere and do anything, you would think the story would be more creative. But instead, the story is extremely sloppy and feels like not much effort was put into it at all. I mean just look at the length of each story event, you have the prologue being 40 minutes, then five episodes which are supposed to be the main act all being 10 minutes each. Then you have the finale which is 90 minutes long, have the developers ever heard of pacing?! Even if we ignore the discombobulated narrative, in total this game only has around 140 minutes worth of “story”. That in itself is enough to warrant a negative response, but what I’m about to share honestly is just a disaster that should never happen in any game in the industry.

I’m specifically talking about the final episode, see now whilst playing the game you would assume the final chapter would play out in a similar fashion to the previous episodes right? But remember when I said the final episode is 90 minutes long, you would think that such a variation would call for a warning to make reference to the length, but this is not the case. Now for the final episode, this will require you to fight all five of the warriors of hope robots in a single fight and that’s when Monokuma resets the simulation. It’s here where you only have one choice and that’s to go into the development mode with the normal variant of Makoto, this is where you need to play the board as usual but defeat the first two monobeasts and return to the beach where you will then fight all of the monokubs. Finally, you get to use your preselected team to fight Monokuma, and hopefully defeat him and complete the story mode.

However, if at any point you fail to defeat the monobeasts and return to the beach in time, fail to defeat the monokubs, or fail to defeat Monokuma, you will be forced to start all over again with Makoto. And this single handley is the worst part about this game. The fact the game punishes you and forces you to backtrack and repeat around an hour's worth of gameplay is ludicrous. This is especially the case when at any other point in the game, if you die you just get spawned at the beginning of the board and try again. But because this is a story battle they probably decided not to include that option, however, there isn’t even a retry button if you do die, which keep in mind is present in every other Danganronpa game. But that isn’t even the cherry on top, because if for whatever reason you feel like you need to make your team stronger, the game more or less fucking soft locks you out of doing this. You heard me right, once you enter the final episode, you cannot leave until you defeat the final boss. Trust me when I say this, but when this happened to me I lost all respect and hope for this game. You seriously cannot tell me that this game was playtested properly on the fact no one at any point thought it was a-ok to allow the game to soft-lock you out of the game. Nothing you can do makes you leave the episode, you can close the game and boot it up and have everything locked off, even uninstalling and reinstalling the game will keep you locked out. This seriously has to be an example for future games on how not to programme a campaign because the only found solution I could find was to completely reset your progress, for a game that has gatcha mechanics to progress the story. You cannot make this shit up. Once again, why is there no warning before entering the final episode with this in mind? Not to mention how this issue was identified when the game was released on the switch, meaning this catrasphy has been present for 8 months and wasn’t even tackled when porting it to other systems!!!

Before I pop a blood vessel though, I also have highlighted another potential issue with the game's pacing. As previously mentioned, the prologue is 40 minutes long and you cannot access any of the settings until you are thrown into the development mode. The reason why I mention this is that Steam has a refund policy where if you are dissatisfied with a product you can refund it as long as the game selected was bought in the past two weeks and you have spent no longer than two hours on it. The second condition is what the issue is with Danganronpa S, when you combine the long loading times and the prologue, it’s a highly probable chance that before you have gotten a feel for the game whether you want to continue or request a refund, you would have gone over that two-hour threshold which forces you out of a refund. Because trust me 10 hours into the game I started regretting my purchase but I couldn’t do anything about it due to Steam’s policy. But with this all in mind, how about would you actually progress the story to begin with? This directly links into the biggest issue with the game.

This game is such a grindfest, in order for you to progress you will be having to do the same thing over and over and over which yields this game to be extremely monotonous and it honestly sucks all the potential fun out of it. Because in order to initiate the story you have to collect hope fragments which are obtained after you complete the development of a character. The problem though is the number of hope fragments you need, to get access to episode one you must have collected ten hope fragments… you only start with four characters.

This is where the gatcha mechanics come into play because in order to unlock other characters you need to go to the school store to spin for characters. This isn’t a problem on its own as long as it’s executed well, but for a series known for executing most of their characters, it does a poor attempt at this. The main problem here is the currency. There are three monomachines, each one providing a different reward. The monomono machine accepts silver monocoins and will yield normal and rare variants of characters. Next is the golden monomono machine which accepts gold monocoins and will yield ultra-rare variants. Finally is the monomono yachine which accepts pink monomi coins and yields the swimsuit variants.

There is however another vending machine which has caused a lot of discourse within the fandom as many have criticised the mere existence of microtransactions within a Danganronpa game. Personally, I do think some people are exaggerating by making claims that the game pushes you to spend money, but this isn’t like one of those shitty Facebook games that prevents you from progressing without a specific character in mind. Like yeah, it is kinda shitty, but honestly, the prices could be way worst, like with what some companies have done in the past.

The real issue is how you obtain the different coins, there are two ways, the first being the despair tower. As you climb the tower you will eventually find floors that have mobs that have the chance of dropping coins. But this is what I mean when I say grindfest, if you want those monocoins you are going to need to clear the same floor over and over just for the chance of a monocoin drop. Granted the odds are higher for bosses, but still, this just becomes like an idle game where to obtain new characters you need an auto clicker for you to grind monocoins while you’re away from the game. Not to mention, this is only for silver monocoins. If you want gold monocoins you’re going to have to fight your way up to floor 110 which will take many hours of levelling up your characters and many more hours actually climbing the tower. I know you can also collect silver monocoins by completing the missions associated with every floor, but again eventually you will get missions like beating the floor within x turns or completing the floor without being affected by status ailments. Missions like these are going to require you to come back later on when your team is at a much higher level so you can one-shot most enemies. Therefore this isn’t a reliable form of income of silver monocoins. Not to mention in order to collect the silver monocoins you have to complete all three missions rather than obtaining one monocoin per mission.

The second method then is fulfilling Usami’s flowers which are the in-game achievements. However, most of the rewards will only be the monomi coins and for how much effort they require it’s not a good reward at all. Before I even continue with my point, let me just exemplify how lazy these achievements are as they are just copied and pasted of the same thing, look at the first page of achievements, it’s literally just “acquire x amount of characters cards” six times with a total of 17 of these achievements. And it’s not just a one-off, look at these others, “acquire x hyper cards”, “complete development for x characters”, “reach level 99 with x characters”, and it goes on. The rewards of these achievements are shit as well, I mean look at the first one of acquiring 10 characters, the reward is only one coin which will give you a chance of obtaining one new character. Again most of these achievements are easy in nature, they are just time-consuming and this is perfectly shown in the “reach level 99 with x characters” achievements. To do the exact same method with all 60 characters will take 600 minutes which is 10 hours!!! You could watch the entire Danganronpa anime or one arc of the Danganronpa 3 anime in that time! The worst is yet to come though as you have the complete development for x characters which goes up to 200, that means the game wants you to play as every single variant of every single character once! Not only is that going to take a ridiculous amount of time, but the reward is laughable, two fucking monomi coins, god forbid we get an actual fucking reward like an animated movie, hidden playable characters, “date” events, etc. But no, because you’ve unlocked all the variants of all the characters these coins will most likely just end up being presents to bring with you in a new game. Once again to reinforce this idea that the game is a complete grindfest is shown with the “clear x tower y times”, like the developers knew we would have to grind to get the monocoins because otherwise why would they think we would want to clear each tower 200 times?

Let me go back to what I said about the gameplay, the whole point of development mode is to maximise a character's level so that character can then be used in the despair tower. But as early as the beginning of the game, you are going to need to play as all four beginning characters to form a team to speed up the farming process of monocoins. But again, this is going to require you to get as far as possible within 50 turns for each character and this entire thing took me 20 minutes all the while skipping all dialogue. As a result, to do this with the three other characters alone will take you one or two hours just so you can grind in the despair tower for the chance to get silver monocoins for the chance of a new character. Do y’all not see the problem here? Progression is painstakingly slow and repetitive so how you’re supposed to gain fun out of this torture I don’t know. In all honestly, I think they should have made it so that when you finish the development mode with a specific character, if you were to redo the development mode with the same character then you should have that save carry over. This way you don’t need to start at level one every single time and it would allow for progress to be made much faster. Additionally, with those character saves within the despair tower, you should be able to change out skills for skills already learned. Because the amount of times I would have to replay the same character in development mode just so I could change the skill layout was so frustrating.

But it gets even worst somehow because you might be asking what the reward is for climbing up the despair tower? The answer to that is every 20 floors cleared allows you to buy one of the five scrolls that weaken the monobeasts from the beginning of the game which allows you to travel to later islands faster. Granted, when you pair this up with every 10 hope fragments collected you increase the XP multiplier and the initial amount of Jabberwok coins, it allows you to snowball in theory. But it all comes back to gatcha mechanics, as the character roulette is singlehandedly the factor that will detriment progression within the game. I understand some people like using ratios to find the game that will provide the most enjoyment by finding out the pound per hour of gameplay. So in theory I’ve spent 80 hours and the game was £18, this would come to a ratio of three hours of enjoyment per pound, but this game just isn’t fun. Honestly, after maybe 5 hours, I just muted the game and started listening to my own music and eventually I would just let the game idle while I farmed for monocoins or materials for crafting. This leaves me to finally talk about Spike Chunsoft and why I think this game is the way it is.

Spike Chunsoft

When you compile all of the Danganronpa games side by side together, Danganronpa S stands out like a sore thumb. With the three mainline games, they all maintain what makes Danganronpa so incredible, with each consecutive game building from the previous and incorporating new elements to make the game fresh. Even Ultra despair girls albeit a spin-off still remains on brand and maintains the themes of the series. But Danganronpa S is just a shell of its former self, I understand that this isn’t supposed to be the next killing game, but even as a fan service game it’s so hollow. Don’t get me wrong, I love fan service but Spike could have tried way harder if they just wanted to provide a game full of fan service.

This leads me to my personal theory to explain why Spike is doing the things that they are doing. So in 2017 came the release of Danganronpa V3, and by the ending of the game, Kazutaka Kodaka the creator of Danganronpa made it crystal clear that this was the end of the game series. This was due to Danganronpa reaching it’s limit with no more possible room for growth, I mean we’ve had three killing games with a similar structure and the mastermind being the same person but in three different ways. There is nothing else Danganronpa can do without collapsing in on itself unless it did a reboot of the series in some fashion.. As a result, Spike was going to lose one of its most profitable game series, so when the 10th anniversary came out, I believe they made a business decision to more or less milk every last penny out of the series before the active fandom moved on. This is why I believe the 10th anniversary was honestly overly hyped up as by looking in retrospect, nothing much happened. Now I understand that Spike’s core target audience will be Japanese as well as the fact that 2020 had the pandemic which made things chaotic. But considering that Danganronpa grew a cult following in the West due to the internet, you would have thought they would have done more digital events. But looking at the wiki all that entailed from the anniversary was the Danganronpa card version of werewolf, the cross-over with Identity V, the hope keeps going on videos, Danganronpa Kirigiri volume 7, the Danganronpa event at the Pasela Resorts cafe, the Danganronpa books, and the ports.

The ports themselves are what I want to focus on as they support my theory of Spike more or less selling out. I mean seriously who wanted Danganronpa one, two, and V3 ported for phones? It just seems such a questionable decision considering the size of the games, not to mention how they would perform in the class trials, especially V3. But then we had the announcement of Danganronpa decadence for the switch, again I believe they were just trying to maximise profits by making the game accessible to more or less anyone. Again making the game accessible isn’t bad on its own, but the real kicker was when they announced that Daganronpa S would be exclusive to the switch, like am I the only one who thinks that was a pretty shitty thing to do? If you look at the roots of Danganronpa, you would know the whole series began on the PSP and every subsequent game always came out on a Playstation product, so the fact they made Danganronpa S exclusive or at least momentarily exclusive for a Nintendo product just seems fishy. Either way, I believe Spike wanted Kodaka to help with a new Danganronpa game for the anniversary but he declined because there wasn’t anything else more to do with the series. As a result, I believe this is why Danganronpa S again stands out compared to the other games. This is because Kodaka has worked on every Danganronpa game as either a planner or director, but after the release of V3 in 2017, Kodaka left Spike to launch his own game company. But even though he is the creator, Spike owns the rights to Danganronpa and henceforth can milk the franchise until it’s dry. And this is reinforced by the credits in Danganronpa S as Kodaka is nowhere to be found.

Even if Spike wanted to grow the audience by catering to Switch owners, it’s still weird that within the trailer for Danganronpa decadence they go out of their way to avoid spoilers as much as possible, but when Danganronpa S is shown they just show Junko dead smack in the centre with the Monokuma hairpins. I’m not even going to comment on the Danganronpa decadence cover art, but who thought compiling Danganronpa one, two, V3, and S all the while excluding Ultra despair girls was a good idea when characters from Ultra despair girls show up in S. I feel like the advertising of Danganronpa S was also misleading though. Specifically in the pre-order trailer where they implied there was going to be voice acting or partial voice acting. Not to mention the inclusion of new original CGs when in reality, there are only a total of six CGs in Danganronpa S. Two of these being edited versions of Danganronpa two CGs, the two CGs shown in the trailer, one CG directly pulled from Danganronpa two, and the last CG being original but only unlocked at the very end of the story.

Conclusion

With all of this in mind, considering that Danganronpa S is currently £18, I would avoid this game at all costs regardless of how tempting it is. There is no substance to the game in any regard and no character interaction nor story can justify the price tag. There is not an ounce of originality or creativity with all the reused assets. The game is a grindfest which forces you to do the same monotonous tasks over and over to farm coins for the chance of unlocking new characters to progress the story. Games are supposed to be fun, not a chore. The only reason to buy this game would be to see the new character interactions, gain the Steam accessories, or to support Spike Chunsoft. But in all honestly, you can view all the interactions on Youtube for free, you can buy the Danganronpa S accessories on the community Steam market, and for Spike Chunsoft, I think this game has shown their money-hungry nature. So if you want my advice, buy an actual good game for a similar price to save yourself the hassle and disappointment.

After 100%ing the game by finishing all routes and getting all achievements I wanted to share my thoughts on the game as there are some good things about Inescapable, but many areas where it fails and could have been improved. To keep things more organised I’ll list off the things that Inescapable does right before breaking down the problems.

The good
The premise of Inescapable blends itself well into creating drama between characters and most certainly something fans of games like the Danganronpa series, Zero Escape series, Your Turn to Die, etc will resonate with. It also reflects the dark psychological curiosity of how strangers can be pushed to their limits akin to reality shows like Big Brother or Survivor, especially with characters being held captive against their will for six months. The artwork within the game is also praiseworthy as the artists did an amazing job of making every character’s design unique and reflect their personality in some form. It was also a delight to hear characters use their native tongue throughout the game with everyone's performance being good. However, I have to give extra praise to the VAs for Isak, Eva, and Naomi. Speaking of characters, there is a huge variety of personalities for everyone to find someone to like as well as everyone demonstrating some form of character development and having their moment to shine throughout the story.

The bad
Marketing
A big part of why the game is receiving a large amount of negative reviews stems from being misled by the marketing of the game. I understand that naming Danganronpa and Zero Escape as sources of inspiration for the game was done to increase traction for sales, however, this would ultimately end up shooting the developers in the foot. The ramifications of this are priming players to believe that the game will be a killing game, this isn’t necessarily false as there is a route within the game that does replicate the Danganronpa formula of having a body discovery (pink blood as well!), investigating the scene of the crime, questioning everyone, and having a comic style conclusion of the events that lead to the death of a character. The problem however is that this only makes up one of the four possible routes so players will be forced to play three other routes that deviate from what they already know and love. The Steam page doesn’t help matters either with the game being tagged with “mystery”, “detective”, and “investigation”, as well as it being referred to as a social thriller. The price has also been heavily criticised, but it was stated by the developers that completion of the first route would take around 40 hours, with completion of all routes taking up to 90 hours. If this was the case then I, as well as many others could justify it. However, I’ve finished all routes and gotten all achievements before hitting that 40-hour mark which makes me believe their estimation of playtime is vastly overestimated. Granted this could be due to myself being a quick reader, but estimating 90 hours of reading seems excessive.

Gameplay problems
Even as a visual novel I feel like inescapable is lacking key features that are synonymous with the visual novel genre. For example, there is no gallery for you to accumulate CGs as you progress through the game nor any option to see character sprites or listen to the music or voice lines in the game. Additionally, the game lacks a skip read text feature which tarnishes part of the replay value as you run the risk of skipping new dialogue which is puzzling as they opted to disable the skip feature altogether in the settings when you first begin. However, even when you do use the skip or auto text feature, it’s only enabled for a single scene so you will need to click it for every new scene. Keep in mind you’ll have to reclick it up to three times per in-game day which can be very monotonous if you are trying to access a new route. Not to mention, if you do accidentally misclick dialogue that is voiced, when you open up the log you are unable to replay said voiced line. Although not terrible, a maximum of 30 save slots did become a nuisance when replaying the game as you will have to overwrite save files which can be confusing. It would be appreciated if there were more save slots or once you begin a route there’s some sort of indicator on the save file to reflect the route you are on.

Even outside of being a visual novel, there are game-specific designs that I can’t quite wrap my head around for why they have done it the way they have. For example, character bios are a great feature of the game for providing players with a foundation of knowledge for the contestants and I was greatly fond of the gossip and dirt feature later attached to the bios. However, the fact that the character bios are later removed is abysmal. Why incorporate a feature if you only take it away from players, especially the dirt and gossip aspects? It feels like a missed opportunity for the bios to be expanded upon, especially with spending time with certain characters akin to how Danganronpa does it. Even with the gossip and dirt, it feels extremely underutilised and only used for the player instead of Harri. This is made more apparent when you can have scenes with characters where Harri asks them about a certain piece of information and you get their side of events. As a result, it feels like every contestant has done many ♥♥♥♥♥♥ things without having the opportunity to see the whole picture.

The character bios is not the only app that is underutilised, there is also the inventory which is used for the narrative only a couple of times, and once again is not something the player controls. Instead throughout the game, there are objects you can collect but serve no purpose and feel more akin to rewards for witnessing certain events. Taking another page out of Danganronpa, this felt like another opportunity for you to give characters items to bond with or at least find out more information about them. Depending on the route you end up on, there are two out of the three apps that you unlock that are practically useless. The first is the wireland app on the greed route which isn’t even shown on the phone but only ever mentioned during conversations. The problem arises when everyone is out for themselves but there is no possible way to track how much money everyone else possesses which could have been a great form of conflict between the cast. But last, because you never have any indicator as to how much money people have, regardless of what people charge for their services it will never have an impact. Then there is the voting app used in the lust route where you can rank characters, the only problem being that this has no bearing on the story whatsoever. As a result, what is the point of incorporating these apps if they aren’t even taken advantage of for the story?

Speaking of unnecessary features, I have to question the inclusion of the word guesser, fishing, and arcade minigames as once again they don’t serve a purpose for the story nor do they reward players for completing them outside of an achievement. Again this feels like a missed opportunity for players to be rewarded with something that can affect relationships, for example having an interaction with each character whose score you’re able to beat within the arcade games.

Next up are the multiple narratives that were advertised, again this created unrealistic expectations when you cited the Zero Escape series as an inspiration as people would expect a flowchart of some kind where your choices matter. However, I understand why a flowchart would not work for this game in particular; as choices are accumulative rather than choosing from A or B options. Nonetheless, the choices that you do make don’t feel like they make a huge impact in the short term and are treated akin to any other visual novel with diverting narrative threads. As a result, some of the choices you make feel inconsequential but can result in you in a route that you wouldn’t expect. This is more of a problem after your first ending as there is a lack of information to convey to the player as to how their choices can impact the route selection, something as simple as highlighting the previous choice and stating what route this point towards would be very beneficial. The problem though with this approach is that because choices are acumulative, it makes the start of the game very repetitive with the majority of the first 50 days being skipped upon replay. To make matters worse, if you are actively avoiding certain actions to prevent repeating a route, the game fails to make days pass easily. This is because the only way to forfeit your free time is to either start an arcade game and then quit or go fishing and catch a fish, both options taking time to execute. It doesn’t make sense as to why there couldn’t be an option to just take a nap within your room to progress time like how many other visual novels do.

Finally, when you do eventually arrive on a new route, there are limited choices for you to make which makes the route feel very linear. Once again this feels like a missed opportunity for there to be multiple endings within each route to maximise replayability as well as a way to incorporate a flowchart to allow players to skip directly to the beginning of a route.

Story problems
I understand that the game was supposed to be character-driven, but with such an incredible premise I would have thought the developers would have done more with the story than what was done. What I mean is they describe the game as a social thriller but there was never really a point where I was on the edge of my seat or scared for the characters from tension. The root of this problem is found in the lack of threat within the game. Even though the hosts reiterate that there are no rules, the game just bleeds into becoming a slice of life as if everyone is just on a paid resort. Exactly why would any of the contestants want to leave? They have all their needs met with the show providing shelter, food, water, entertainment, and heck contestants can even request items for deeds. But again, this feature is underutilised and not taken seriously as contestants can easily make an offer and not follow up on said offer and there are no consequences for this. One could make the argument that the hosts don’t want to interfere too much, but that’s thrown out of the window once you start different routes as they can complain that it’s too boring with nothing going on. They can stop providing them with necessities but this is only explored in one of the routes.

Once again it feels like a missed opportunity to take a page out of Danganronpa with the hosts providing motives to stir up drama. For example, the hosts have all this dirt on all the contestants so why don’t they use that against them to engage with the show more? The possibilities are endless as we could have bear witness to see how far people are willing to go to hide their secrets or to get the upper hand within the game. What about a scenario where contestants have the choice to gain rewards if they screw over their fellow peers, this would have been a great form of conflict but this was largely ignored. Even with how the game is structured, every single route has problems that do a disservice to the premise.

The first of these routes is the lust route which is hands down the worst route in the entire game. It has the potential to introduce the popularity vote which rewards the most popular contestant as well as punishing the least popular contestants. The problem lies in that this shouldn’t be exclusive to this route and should have been incorporated near the beginning of the show. Why exactly would the popularity of contestants only become relevant after the viewers have watched for 50-60 days? It could have planted the seed to see what contestants are willing to do to gain popularity as well as had the potential to explore the theme of how popularity can warp the way people think and act. This would have blended especially well for the characters of Eva who constantly wants to be approved and in the spotlight, as well as Isak who is contemptuous of being an outcast. However, instead of doing this, the game decides to focus on being as perverted as possible by the protagonist becoming a womaniser. Not to mention, the actual punishments were very insignificant and did nothing to cause fear or tension. If you wanted a social thriller, why not have the least popular contestant be killed off or something? But least the popularity contest becomes counter-productive when it’s revealed that the rankings are dependent on viewers rather than the contestants as well as the system being overhauled to the likes of Isak with his connection to Naomi. As a result, the whole gimmick of popularity becomes redundant and out of control to the player. Instead, I think this shouldn’t have been a route and instead a hidden ending or something accessible early on in the game to make way for an actual good route.

The next route is the greed route which once again has the potential to see how far people are willing to go to screw others to maximise their profits. It was practically begging for a discussion of capitalism. This is made even more apparent when you have the character of Isak who complains about capitalism within society in other parts of the game. There easily could have been a conversation involving Lumi about the effects capitalism has on the environment on the island if people were willing to destroy the island for profit. But this is never explored and instead, we get a narrative about Valerie opening a restaurant. The worst part is the beginning of the route doesn’t make any sense at all. Why capitalise on meals that are made from food that is given to everyone? This could have easily been changed to where the hosts were offering luxurious rewards for a price which would have been an incentive to gamble and screw others over. The worst part though is the game fails to engage players for any of the stakes as the Wireland app isn’t accessible on the phone. As a result, you can’t monitor how much money everyone has, again this could have been a point of conflict between the cast. But instead when people are charging something like €30,000, we as players don’t even know how much money characters have to assess if this will impact them. The ending is also very anticlimactic, I do like the idea of the protagonist dying to demonstrate that plot armour won’t save you in this game. But the way it’s executed leaves much to be desired. It’s a shame that this and the previous route are the easiest to stumble upon as they are significantly the weakest in the game and can make players believe they reflect the quality of the whole game.

The trust route is certainly better than both the lust and greed routes, however, I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s good. The main problem I found from the route is the lack of authority the hosts have over the show. Again only in this route do the hosts decide to punish contestants for being boring by removing privileges. Not only should this threat be present from the beginning of the game, but there is the missed opportunity to do something similar to what Danganronpa V3 does with having a countdown for someone to murder. Even upon the cast boycotting the show until someone “dies”, all of a sudden the hosts disregard removing their privileges again which puts out any potential further tension. Not to mention, the death of Sasha loses all intended impact at the end of the route when it’s revealed to the player that they are alive shortly after the explosion. It was nice to see all the characters be united, but it’s far from being a social thriller as the route feels more akin to the true ending of the game.

Finally is the detective route, this is single-handedly the only route players will be interested in from the promotion of the game. Although the best route, it still suffers from issues. The main one is how hand-held the whole route feels, I’m glad we get access to the island sleuth app which allows us to collect and deduce evidence. However, it is too easy to simply brute force your way through deductions and incorrectly guess answers. The lack of punishment for getting things wrong could have easily led to a bad ending on this route but this wasn’t implemented. Even when it comes to concluding the events that had transpired, there is no minigame to test the player to see if they understand what happened as it is just given to you. Not to mention, these investigation and deduction moments are paced poorly, it’s strange that when asking characters about their testimonies, you have to converse with them twice. It’s also rather silly that you can only converse with one character per time slot in the day. As a result, it can take you up to six days just to get testimony. The treatment of the culprits is another missed opportunity, there was the possibility of having a killer walk around freely which easily could have contributed to tension, but instead, they are cast away and might as well have been killed off. I did enjoy the premise of the last case, but feel like the motivation behind it doesn’t make sense for the parties involved. Not to mention, once that case is wrapped up the game time skips at the very end of the game even though there was enough time for either another murder to occur or for a conversation between Harri and the rest of the cast.

Altogether the game fails to answer many questions players would have about the game. What is the connection between all the contestants? I originally thought it was going to be something along the lines of civilians who are viewed as good in society but have skeletons in their closets. I don’t know if the developers had a theme in mind, but the fact the characters don’t try to deduce it themselves feels odd. Additionally, we don’t get any information about the hosts of the show. Why do they host the show? Did they create the show? How are they able to pull all of this off? There are many questions about them but we never get any answers. The same thing can be said about the show, who is watching? How many are watching? The only time when the reception of the show is brought into light is when Isak is given a gift by a viewer, other than that the game fails to reiterate that this is a game show.

Character problems
For a game that states it’s character-driven, I found a lot of characters to be lacking, especially when you take into consideration how much time you spend with these characters. This stems from the fact that even though you can spend time with the cast in your free time, the majority of the text feels like fluff. The interactions fail to understand the characters' motivations and after obtaining maximum friendships with every character, it feels like we never go beyond the surface level. There were so many things I’d love to know about certain characters but it’s never brought up nor are you able to find out yourself by asking. As a result, I was able to like characters but none of them will stick with me as nothing is done for them to stand out.

I’ll break down the problems I have with every character below:

Harri - For being the protagonist you would think we would get the most information out of him but there is barely anything. He makes references to him being a bus driver and an event that made him lose everything. But the event in question is only brought up in the trust route and he doesn’t even go into detail about it. You would imagine something that almost ruined his life would be spoken about in more detail. Apart from that, Harri is frustrating in that his personality is all over the place for what feels like the route dictates his personality. This is made most apparent during the lust route where he becomes a complete degenerate who thinks it’s perfectly okay to flirt and overstep practically every girl's boundaries. The way he acts is also a complete contradiction as earlier in the game, Harri makes comments about toxic masculinity and misogyny and yet in this route he does the same thing he complains about. I feel bad for people who are exposed to this route because Harri is a complete cunt of a manchild.

Mia - Mia is weird in the sense that it feels like the game wants to treat her as the sidekick to Harri, but in all honestly I found Mia quite unlikable. I understand Mia has good intentions but I dislike how she tries to take control of most situations, like she will complain about the lack of order but fails to realise there are no rules on the island. The way she acts sometimes makes it like her ego is too big, I’m glad characters do call her out on it because there are many situations where she comes across as a dictator on what the group should do. For example, the game tries to make you feel bad for Mia when Gio ends up snapping at her, but I thought she got what she deserved for going into someone else's room and looking at their stuff without permission. But the way the game tries to pose her in a positive light just doesn’t sit right with me.

Daan - I don’t have many problems with Daan except with the whole justice thing in the detective route. The problem is that he admits that killing the culprit is going too far, but then he goes against that at the end of the route.

Valarie - Valarie is easily the most dislikable person in the whole cast. I understand what they were trying to do with her character but when 90% of the game she is a snob that uses Anika for her benefit I’m going to struggle to like her.

Eva - Eva starts as being quite annoying but honestly, I think she is one of the better characters all things considered. Yes, her overuse of slang can be a bit over the top at times but she was easily the character that made me LOL the most while playing. I’m glad she is one of the few characters that isn’t completely one-dimensional.

Francisca - Again another character I think they pulled off quite well. I think the only issue I had with her was in the lust route when she got offended by Harri when he suggested an open relationship. But then in a previous route, she ends up doing that same thing with Sasha and Gio.

Isak - I love Isak, he was easily my favourite character playing through the game as he was entertaining. However, I do think he lacks being serious in certain scenes as he’s very overdramatic and theatrical throughout the whole game which can get tiring. I also have a huge problem as to how there is some sort of relationship he has with Naomi but the game fails to explain said relationship. I theorised he willingly signed himself up for the show and would act like a mole among the group but again this never came to fruition.

Annika - Honestly the sweetest cinnamon bun that needs protecting. I do wish we were given an actual explanation as to why she refers to herself in the third person instead of being hinted towards the fact.

Sasha - I found Sasha to be a very frustrating character, they are way too edgy and overtly sexual for no good reason. It wasn’t ever funny and the constant use of pop culture references doesn’t make sense for them in comparison to Eva. It’s also hard to take Sasha seriously when they try to act all tough but then literally always associate themselves with the two strongest characters in the game. They were also frustrating in the detective route as they complained that Harri was doing a poor job at playing detective but then actively tried to be as unhelpful as possible during investigations. It’s also hypocritical that they want their pronouns to be respected but have no problem using a slur.

Lumi - For the most part I liked Lumi for being a quieter character, it helped to balance out some of the more out-there personalities. The only thing I dislike about Lumi is the way they treat her being Asexual. It’s never really brought up throughout the whole story and the way it’s portrayed at the end of the trust route it feels very lazily put together. Lumi is supposed to be 23 years old and it only occurs to her at the very end of the game that she doesn’t want to engage with the sexual side of the relationship. With how frequently relationships and sex get brought it, it would have been so easy to allow this to be developed but it feels more like an afterthought. Especially when Lumi is used as the choice during the hallucination to get onto the lust route.

Gio - Gio is meant to be a threat as it’s revealed that he has ties to the mafia and from that point forward he becomes the closest thing to a villain within the contestants. The problem is that outside of being physically stronger than everyone and having bursts of anger, he doesn’t pose much of a threat nor make the lives of everyone else worse. Additionally, just like Lumi, the way the writers treat Gio’s sexuality is ignorant at best and offensive at worst. This is because it is shoehorned at the very end of the game without any build-up or foreshadowing. The worst part is that his sexuality could have easily had a compelling story and boosted Gio as a character by containing some amazing character development.

With how the developers treat Lumi and Gio, the audacity of them to advertise the game for diversity is honestly a joke. This is related to how the writers had no problem for Eva, Francisa, and Sasha to exhibit bisexual behaviour but they can’t be bothered to write a character who is asexual or gay. It’s also questionable how it’s only the girls that exhibit this bisexual nature but all of the guys are immune from it.

In conclusion, Inescapable has so much potential to be an incredible story but fails to utilise mechanics to enhance the experience. It turns into a gameshow where anything can happen to a slow, tedious, slog with a large cast of uninteresting one-dimensional characters.