2026-02-02

Here comes yet another Visual Novel from Spike Chunsoft, the studio mostly famous for the Danganronpa series. I reviewed not too long ago Rain Code, which was another nice entry in their line-up.

I can see you guys already rolling your eyes “oh no, yet another Visual Novel!” and I can understand the feeling. But this one is a little different and tries to shift the expectations of the genre. Instead of giving you a linear storyline that you have to follow, it’s divided in 5 parts, and each part is a distinct type of game. But before going there, let me explain how the story starts. Feel free to skip it, but it’s hardly a spoiler since this is litterally how things start in the first few minutes.

End of the world?

As the game starts, you see a giant, strange-looking, statue on the horizon. It’s early morning. And something is seen falling from the top of the statue. Zooming in, you discover that it’s actually the pieces of a dismembered person that are falling to the ground.

A few moments later, your character awakens inside a hotel room, as you hear the entrance bell ring, over and over again. As you open the door, two strange characters, a man and a short woman, disguised as angels, enter the room. They claim to be actual angels. Can we trust anything they say? They come here to tell you that you have been resurrected into this body - and that you were the person just murdered, dismembered and thrown from the heights of the giant statue a little while ago.

You have been brought back to life to find your murderer and make him admit his crime. But your time is limited. If you can’t find the murderer in the next hours, the spell that brought you back will be broken, and you will be dead for good.

But the most important information is that you are not just nobody. You are the founder and leader of the Shuten Order, a sect that everyone follows in this city. Highly respected and appreciated. Who would dare to murder the founder?

As you infiltrate the government offices where the founder used to lead, you find out that there are 5 ministries who were directly supporting the founder. Each of them directed by a different leader. Your suspicions are that one of them may have decided to get rid of the founder in order to become the new leader. But who did it? And how will you find out? In order to hide your identity, you put some kind of mask, and take a fake identity - your name will now be Rei Shimobe.

A New Approach

First, one of the big differences with other visual novels out there is the fact that it is non-linear. it lets you start your investigation with any of the 5 suspects. You can say that ultimately, it does not change anything, since you have to complete all chapters anyway, but that’s a nice touch nonetheless. And then, the innovation from Shuten Order comes to light. Every chapter is a different game.

• Investigating the Ministry of Justice leads to an investigative visual novel, a la Ace Attorney.
• Dealing with the Information chief, the eye-patched woman, puts you in a love simulator!
• The one with the Science chief is a text-based visual novel, along with branching decisions that lead to different outcomes. (somewhat similar to Paranormasight’s story system).
• Another one pairs you with the Security chief (another eye-patched woman!) and is about escaping a monster in a 3D third person game, while you are stuck indoors - with puzzles to solve to ensure you can escape on time.
• And the fifth one is an extreme escape mode to find the Minister of Health who has been captured along with 20 other people.

And you can do the parts in any order you’d like. Which means the chapters are kind of indenpendent from each other’s - they are self-contained stories.

It’s a strength as well as a potential weakness. As much as I like things like Danganronpa, I must admit the routine “someone get killed - find clues - unveil the killer” mechanism does get a little old when you are doing the 10th one in a row and you are like 40 hours in the game.

The variety that Shuten Order provides is a very welcome change. Each of the parts will feel familiar, sure, but each of them has less of it.

On paper, it felt like it could be refreshing, at least.

I had fun in the first two parts I tried. The investigation with the Ministry of Justice was well done.

The Justifice Minister is tasked to investigate a murder in a super rich family, and takes you in as an assistant. Classical point’n click experience is on the menu, with clues to find across locations, conversations unlocking more clues, and a time-pressure to find the killer. And of course, you end up confronting them, and at that time you will need to have an implacable logic to explain the unresolved mysteries at hand.

There are some good ideas in this part. Several family members of the rich family gang up on the young servant to make it look like she committed the crime.

To you, it’s kind of clear that she is not the culprit, but your mission will be to first defend her and clear her from maldoing as often as she is attacked, even before even trying to unmask the killer.

Most of the characters you suspect are assholes, too, so it’s not obvious from the get go who is the most evil one. Ultimately, you have to harvest a bunch of clues and character relationships to piece together to finally understand what happened (and it’s bigger than the murder itself and ties nicely with Shuten Order’s background story). That was a good start in the game. It made me really interested in knowing more.

Next, I went for the Love Simulator part - which is set up as a parody. The Information Chief injects you with a poison that will kill you in 24 hours. Why not get rid of you immediately? Well, her fantasy is to experience True Love, and she challenges you to find her, seduce her and declare your love before the time runs out. If you do, she will give you the antidote that will save your life. Additionally, once you succeed, she will tell you what she knows about the Founder’s murder. After passing out from the first injection, you wake up and find a note telling you she is in hiding inside a high school, and you have to find her. She is in disguise so you should expect her to look nothing like the person you just met.

Being the Information chief, she is an extremely secretive person. Turns out that in the high school, there are three girls that kind of look like her - your job is to unmask the right one.

There is no obvious hint, they have massively different personalities, different hobbies (one of them loves reading, another one loves playing music) but share the same last name as the Information Chief.

The setting is, as expected, completely absurb. On top of the goofy conversations, there’s a bunch of mini-games, and the tension between your character in need of a cure to save their life and the three girls who are all flawed to the core, makes for a bunch of really funny scenes.

Let’s not forget that the gender of the Founder that you incarnate is kind of in question (are you a girl? or a young man? the game leaves this question open for a while), which makes for some more amusing qui pro quo in this part of the game.

Again, good impression and I really enjoyed doing this part.

The Shell starts to Crack

Several games in one? Great idea… until you end up hating some of the games. Had all the 5 parts been fantastic, I would have been esctatic about Shuten Order. Sadly, as I moved on to the third and fourth part, I developed a distate for the whole thing.

The part with the Science chief (that I did after the first 2 parts I mentioned) is really, really boring. The story in that part is not really original, the pacing is too slow, and the branching system making you switch continuously between characters, with some backtracking when reaching bad endings, is not fun at all.

Visually it’s very poor too, with no animations, only text with some static images now and then. This falls apart completely when you compare a masterpiece like Paranormasight that uses the same kind of system and Shuten Order in this part: the best and the mediocre become immediately obvious.

I am really glad I did not start with that one, actually, or I might have stopped the game right there. I managed to crawl through that part (while my motivation was pretty much close to zero), only to start the next part with the Security Chief. In that one, you have a grotesque monster chasing you inside buildings. It’s a third person, top-down view puzzle game, where you must survive and avoid that large monster, by solving clues letting you move forward in the buildings, in real-time.

And this was the final straw. This part is not a visual novel anymore, it’s about being quick, solving stupid puzzles or riddles that make no sense, and running away from the Monster and finding a place to hide when you can’t escape directly.

If you fail, you have to restart the level. This part has nothing to give you back for the effort your put in. There is no cool sub-story to unveil as you progress. There is no amusing scene to entertain you. It’s just a mediocre piece of gameplay that drags on and becomes a chore, very quickly.

And that was it. This is where I decided to stop the game. I’m close to 20 hours in, and this convinced me that I don’t want to waste any further time. I guess I could force myself to continue. But now I dread discovering that the 5th part could be just as bad, or maybe worse! And these parts are never made to be super short. We are talking about 4-5 hours each.

Not that it would save the game at this stage, but for people who end up hating some of the 5 parts, having a story-only mode would be preferable - some option you could activate anytime to skip all the useless gameplay elements of the tedious parts.

A Shame

That is really a shame that I had to stop. I was well involved in the story, and the mystery around it - who killed the Founder? Why? What is actually happening in the Shuten Order that you are not told? Who actually IS the Founder? You get a few partial answers along the way, but getting to the end with a full picture is usually a big reward, especially coming from script writers who were involved in the Danganronpa series. All the art production is also good enough - I must admit I am not a fan of the character design in this game, but you get used to it. The whole game is pretty devoid of animations, though, which makes it feel somewhat like a budget game. It was also not released physically on the Switch at first, which seems to confirm this hypothesis. The game has a ton of voice acting - not for every line of dialog - and in Japanese it’s solid, while certainly more on the anime side of things. The weak point is the voice of the protagonist: some kind of weak, trembling voice - that is successful in keeping an ambiguity about the gender of the Founder, but completely lacks any kind of charisma.

The illusion of freedom - being able to choose any chapter you’d like - does not really bring much benefits. As much as I looked, I could not find some clear reference to what happened in the already completed chapters, except at the very end of each chapter. So, for the most part, it looks like going through the 5 chapters in no particular order has no impact on the outcome of the game. Surely, some kind of missed opportunity.

Would I recommend the game? I’m not sure. It’s certainly not bad, there is a lot of work that went into the world and the lore, the characters arc, and it’s successful at making you invested in the story from the get go. I had to drop mid-way because of the uninspired gameplay, but I’m still intrigued to know the end. I guess my next step is to skim Youtube for a playthrough and discover the end without having to play the tedious parts.

If you end up considering it, be fully aware that this not exactly your traditional visual novel game. Some parts may put you off. If this review has any point, let it be at least a clear warning.

I won’t go at length on the Linux compatibility here, but the game works well both on desktop and on the Steam Deck. Since the game targetted the Switch at release, all UI elements are properly sized for handheld formats which is great. It’s not trouble-free, though. Once in a while, I had the game freeze on me when reaching the end of a scene (when things fade to black) - refusing to move to the next scene. Not too frequent but worth mentioning. No idea if this is Linux specific or if this bug is also there in the Windows version. In any case, the game auto-saves frequently so you do not lose much time when this occurs.

You can find Shuten order on Steam, right now 20% off until the 7th of February 2026.

Disclosure: we have received a review key for this game from the publisher.