Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue

This is what terminally online twitter and tumbler users tell you danganronpa is.

The Good: The art is quite wonderful and the soundtrack is decent. The rest: I'm around 107 days in, and I intentionally used a guide to get the suspicion route. So far, this game is irredeemable. Don't spent money on it (certainly not at full price), don't play it. I'm lucky I got it on sale. I feel bad for the VAs who clearly tried, but were given a bunch of nonsense accents and clearly awful direction. I'm going to keep playing and update after I've given it more of a chance, but seriously I'm warning you now don't play it. Here's an example of something the game has included, the main character telling you they're too tired and going back to sleep like 30 of the 107 days. What is the point of that? Edit 1: I finished the suspicion route, it's so bad. It's sooooooooooo bad.

TL:DR; Characters are unlikable and it has confusing game mechanics. So you may look at my hours, and think I'm a masochist with what I'm about to type, but I wanted to really see all I can before I write this. Hell, I may continue to play just to 100% this because I'm 47/49 on achievements. Regardless, first things first, what is the gameplay like. GAMEPLAY: It's a visual novel, so not much, but it's even less so compared to Danganronpa or Zero Escape. You choose who to talk too, make decisions every so often, and if you want to play a bad "rhythm" fishing game, for lack of a better term, or some jank arcade games, they have them. Someone made a good review on here saying it actually IS like Danganronpa... the School mode if you know what that is. Though it's not clear, [spoiler] the first 57 or so days are when all your choices really matter. [/spoiler] I'll keep it brief, but all choices will fall into one of 4 categories [spoiler]; Lust, Suspicion, Greed, or Trust. [/spoiler] None of this is conveyed to you. Personally, I had to use a walkthrough to figure out how the game works once I went through my first play through. Once you reach the point of no return, you no longer get to affect the game. It is railroaded from that point on and you are stuck with... THE STORY: So... it sucks. Well, kinda. Like I said, there's 4 categories, so the game ends up with 4 different stories. Depending on the story you get, you will either find it to be okay, boring, or you wanna pull your teeth out and throw yourself into a toaster bath. Worse part is that each story is hours long, so if the story you got sucks, you're in for the long haul, and you'll have to replay the entire game to get a new story. Each character can drastically change based on the story as well. In one, they are reasonable and you can like them, in the other you wanna stab them till they stop moving cause every decision they make is either stupid or malicious. Some are just outright unlikable through all stories, but none compare to the main character. MAIN CHARACTER: He is a blank slate British man. Depending on your story path he either is alright and competent to some degree, or a bumbling idiot who is as unlikable as can be. I played all 4 paths, and I can say he is awful in 2/4 stories. Half the stories made me despise playing the game cause he would be insufferable and make very bad decisions that I had no control over. One of the stories he is likable in, you have to play VERY precisely to get, aka a "true ending" sort of deal. So in reality, when you play blind, you are more likely to get one of the 2/3 BAD STORIES where he is the worst character ever. Doesn't help some of the voice acting is questionable in the game. VOICE ACTING: It does have voice acting, and they sure are voices. Some are serviceable, while others are not really all that good. To be fair some of these could be their first time voice acting, so I would say they can do well with more time or better direction, and I didn't find any of them to be AWFUL awful, just not good. OVERALL: I can't recommend this game. The concept could of been used better, and if they didn't try and do Danganronpa School mode, and add all these unnecessary mini games, they could of made a good game. Ditch the arbitrary choices, make the game more linear, and focus on writing one very good story with good fleshed out mechanics, and maybe this would have been a great game. Instead, it's 4 stories, very long ones at that, of varying quality, none of which I would feel confident in calling "good".

I really want to like this game-- truly. Even after seeing all of the reviews I still bought it on sale with tempered expectations because I enjoyed the demo and thought it was a cool intro. The problem with this game isn't just that it's not a true death game like may have been marketed-- it's that the plot is painfully slow to develop. Most of your time is spent having COMPLETELY unimportant filler conversations that don't even really let you meaningfully interact with or get to know the characters, it's just a lot of text spam with some individual personalities thrown in. I actually *like* the characters, and I think that this concept could've been super interesting, but there's just way too much downtime between anything happening. It's like if Danganronpa's entire game was the free time activities that you get between each "case". Over there you might get 2-3 chances per case to talk to someone, have a small chat, and noticeably develop your relationship in a trackable way. On this game, almost every. Single. Day. You do that-- and there are 180 days total, with 2-3 timeslots to fill up per day. The worst part is that you're barely even interacting with them-- you have no relationship tracker, no way to really guide the conversation, usually it's just one small meaningless choice in a conversation that unlocks some brand of flavor text but that doesn't really get you anywhere. This game feels like what Sword Art Online would've been if instead of skipping around to meaningful points in the story that are fun to read/watch, if it told you every single thing that happened from floors 1-100-- made you experience every single grind session and small interaction. It feels cool and interesting at first, but by the time you've gone through it several times, you're just bored and don't care anymore.

I haven't finished this game and don't know if I will, I'm honestly so disappointed because I wanted to love this game, I've been waiting to play it ever since it was first announced. And I think that's why I'm so bitter and why I have decided to write a review, even if it's a negative one. I don't understand the marketing strategy around this game, it was advertised everywhere as a game similar to DR or Zero escape, you can see drops of blood everywhere on the arts, they play around this idea of your character needing to survive but... That's not the case at all. This is not a death game. I'm on day 36 and absolutely NOTHING has happened, I thought a few times that this time something was going to happen, but no. Even our captors don't seem to care about what we do (or don't do) and just... Let us simply enjoy what now seems to be a 6-months long vacation. I've tried "forcing" the game to move forward in a darker direction but [spoiler] even if I buy "dirt" or "gossip" with my points, nothing happens, I can't talk about it to anyone, so I don't see how it is useful [/spoiler] The every day life is also starting to get boring since nothing is happening and our choices when we can pick one don't really seem important, also I was excited when I saw that there was a nonbinary character because I thought it would be a very inclusive game but we don't seem to be able to romance boys, our male character only talks about girls or previous girlfriend so that was also disappointing. Also the introduction of said nb character was weird tbh, it felt forced in a very "in your face" way, instead of just introcing them normally the game spent like 5 mn making the characters going back and forth on the fact that Sasha was not a girl or a boy (and I seem to remember our character thinking something like "oh this is the token character"when we learnt that Sasha was nb???) I had seen some negative reviews warning people about this game and how it wasn't what they had expected and I should have listened, but because I had been waiting for so long, I just had to try it, and the beginning felt so promising too, I don't know why they didn't go with their death game premises and instead did this, I think this game can still be enjoyable to some, but the fact that it was so heavily advertised as a game similar to DR and ZE makes it hard for me not to feel lied to and manipulated. The fact that I spent 50$ on it also explains why I have a hard time giving this game a free pass. Tbh my best way of describing this game would be to say that it felt as if I was playing DR island mode all the time ; we have this setting that is supposed to be scary, but nothing happens and I instead spend my time talking to the characters who tend to make sexual innuendos like 90% of the time. That's it for me, I might update this if things change later on but sadly from what I found when I looked at others reviews, I don't think it will. I'm sorry if I made any mistake as English is not my native language.

I am a big fan of Danganronpa and other mystery and mystery-adjacent games, so I went into this with high hopes and found it very disappointing. Many of these kind of games take a bit to really get going, but this one really takes it to a new level. I got over 4 hours in and still hadn't gotten to any kind of interesting case. It is like if you made a whole game of the the free time segments from Danganronpa, but with less interesting characters. I really can't recommend this one.

This game is awful

This is just false advertising. The game tries to sell itself as a death game, however only like 20% of it is close to that, and the mysteries just really simple and boring. the rest of the game consists of a dating sim, capitalist island and the "true" route, but all of it is really boring. The characters are bland, the hosts are boring and the protagonist is really annoying

Tbh, it's not worth $50 Wish I didn't spend all that time giving it a chance... the story is filled with a lot of idle talking and conversations that really don't hold much meaning at all. There was a while it felt like trying to get through the story was a chore. It was good at some parts, but that was only about 5-10% of the time. This was really disappointing. If you think you are going to be playing a game similar to Your Turn To Die or Danganronpa you will not find it here. Wish I could get a refund. I haven't even finished the story, and I'm not sure if I ever will. I'm very close to the end, but I might just watch the ending or something on youtube... 2/10 :(

This isn't a huge negative review, I don't often do serious reviews but, this game has changed my mind about it. I do feel that it has been mislead by the way it has been marketed as an alternative to zero escape and the like, but this has been a huge letdown in terms of gameplay. As others said, there isn't much action that is happening during gameplay and for the price it is as of this writing at 40, it's not worth buying at all, i'd get this if it was on sale or the price lowered. As of this writing I have currently achieved 3 endings of the game. The only thing I love about this game are the characters that were in the game, (my fav character is anika and sasha) they were well written and I love the genuine character interactions with all the other characters, they were the best highlight of the game that I truly enjoy that made me smile. The voice actors absolutely nail their respective characters portrayed and I love that. I do love the idea of the 2.5D gameplay/map and even the phone texting interactions with other characters which is such a nice thing to read. but this has been a letdown in terms of how i expected puzzles and so on with the way it was marketed at and the gameplay been so tediously boring with nothing but character interactions for the entirety of the game. if not slightly misleading. And yes, I get now that story that they're a gameshow, but even so, it is... boring with no way of finding out what routes you're on. I somehow got the same ending again trying to get the other endings. Would i recommend this to others?... At this point... No.