It’s always cool to see a developer attempt something new. There are so many games that stick to tried and true formulas, following the trends and making a game that will appease the broadest demographic. However, there’s always fun to be had when a game dev team tries something weird. Yurukill: The Calumniation Games is something weird. It’s a mash-up of a familiar visual novel style game with minimal puzzle elements and choice mechanics, and higher stakes moments taking place in a shoot ‘em up. As I said, it’s weird.

Yurukill definitely lives within a similar genre to Danganronpa by following a group of strangers attempting to survive in a deadly game, but there is a little bit more to it. The characters in Yurukill are separated into two groups, prisoners and executioners. Ostensibly, only the prisoners are in danger while competing in the death game, where the executioners are there to watch and help with puzzles if they deem it necessary. Oh yeah, they also have a button they can push at any time to have the prisoner executed.

Prisoners have been dragged into the game unwillingly, all of them serving prison sentences for crimes they didn’t commit, and promised a chance at being acquitted should they win the Yurukill Games. The executioners appear to be participating willingly, but why they would do that is not immediately clear. The games themselves are mostly a set of escape rooms, each themed after the incident that sent the players to prison in the first place and the whole thing is being run within a huge theme park. It does bring to mind questions about who might be running this whole shindig, questions that go disappointedly unanswered.

Binko is the host of the games, filling a similar role to Monokuma in Danganronpa but losing a bit of the charm by being a flesh and blood human instead of a walking talking bear. I flipped between loving and hating her every few encounters. They had this cute joke about her having to run everywhere to make sure she is always waiting when the players reach the next location. She’s always out of breath and it got a laugh out of me most of the time. She also makes puns using her name. It’s less bin-dearing than the game thinks it is.

Yurukill follows an act-by-act structure and each act follows essentially the same formula—an escape room, a big character reveal, and finally the shoot ‘em up section. While the first pair you play as are definitely what I would call the protagonists of the game, you do find yourself playing as different characters throughout. The pairs of characters always involve one prisoner and one executioner, with you usually taking on the prisoner’s role.

Yurukill’s gameplay is hit and miss. The visual novel portions are suitably entertaining most of the time, the dialogue between the characters is fun, and while a few of them are better than others, it all reads nicely with fun interactions. Puzzles take up a decent chunk of these sections as well, and while most of them are interesting and not too difficult, there are multiple times when it feels like key information is missing. The puzzles have a hint system, for each puzzle you have three hints available, getting more and more explicit with each one and I often found myself needing to use the first hint to even understand what the puzzle wanted from me. It wasn’t that the puzzles were hard, it was that I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do.