Your main character wakes with a start, memories missing and unsure where she even is. This is when she realises two other people in the room with her, they are angels, and she was dead a few hours ago. Unwittingly following along behind the pushy angels with little understanding of what is happening, she quickly learns that the country she has awoken in, Shuten, is run by a religious order (lets be real, it’s a cult) named the Shuten Order. Last night the founder of this order was killed, that founder was also her.

Reeling from this realization, the angels do her the decency of helping her choose a temporary name. Now going by Rei, she learns that her goal is to figure out who killed her, get them to confess and then retrieve her stolen soul by killing them. She only has four days to do this before she loses the second chance granted to her by God and one of the founder’s subordinates is the most likely culprit.

Each minister has their own route that can be selected in any order, leading to a three day story where Rei targets them and tries to get them to confess to her murder, but usually gets stuck in a completely unrelated pickle that she has to sort out before any accusations can be made.

The central mystery of Shuten Order is interesting and throughout each route I always found myself hoping for more reveals that would connect back to it but because they can be done in any order, there isn’t much of a sense of greater progression. Each route holds the details relating to the central plot pretty close to its chest and while there are revelations here and there, they often don’t connect to what is learned across the other stories.

There is also an issue with info dumping towards the end of a route, I found this a particularly big issue with both Inugami and Kokushikan’s routes. The insular mystery itself would resolve and then I had a fifteen minute long chat with the respective minister who would provide me new, but altogether unrelated information to what I had just gone through. It made the previous three days feel like preamble, because they had little to do with the actual reveals the route serves up at the end.

I noticed this most glaringly in Ushitora’s route, which sees the protagonist trapped in a death game. Because there is only so much time to establish mechanics for each route, the death game ends up being a whole lot of walking around metal corridors and completing sliding block puzzles to open doors. There is finally a real escape room on the final day, but the lead up to it is a whole lot of mind numbing gameplay, with a decent story in between.

While many of Shuten Order’s routes suffer from a lack of interesting gameplay, Kokushikan’s route actually ends up over-complicating itself. While the gameplay majorly follows the usual mainstays of a dating sim, instead of just having Rei attempting to date Kokushikan across three days, it instead adds a whole complication where they are three separate girls that Rei must date one after the other. It feels very rushed and means that the girls can’t be much more than a combination of basic tropes. It’s an over-complication that just ends in the route feeling frustrating and repetitive.