Within the adventure and visual novel genre lies a subgenre of mystery-solving games where players are tasked with unraveling the mystery of the player-character’s death. This novel approach places the detective in a unique position where supernatural elements come into play, and you effectively play as a dead man. After all, who wouldn’t want to find out what killed them?
Classics like Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, Murdered: Soul Suspect, and the Death Mark games all put their twist on the premise. Even Ghostwire: Tokyo offered a fresh take on what mystery-solving as a ghost could be like. The concept remains fertile, leaving it to the creator of Danganronpa to throw his hat into the ring with his utterly bizarre and outlandish sense of style, showing everyone how it’s done.
Gigantic mega cults, the end of the world, angels, and the power of God itself come together in this anime-infused whodunnit where genres collide! Romance, justice, horror, mystery, and puzzles; oh my! How does it juggle it all at once? Find out in our SHUTEN ORDER review!
SHUTEN ORDER
Developer: Neilo
Publisher: Spike Chunsoft
Platforms: Windows PC, Nintendo Switch (reviewed)
Release Date: September 5, 2025
Price: $49.99
When Shuten Order begins, things seem promising. There is an overwhelming sense of intrigue and mystery afoot, with bizarre visuals depicting a massive city under a dome and a huge statue of a headless figure at its center. A body is discovered, but in pieces, and for some reason, the torso is missing.
The next sequence introduces the amnesiac protagonist who gets acquainted with a pair of angels. They explain the protagonist has died but was not meant to, and has been placed in a temporary body that has a four-day shelf life and must find out who the killer is and get them to confess.
As if this weren’t weird enough, the protagonist was a cult leader of the Shuten Order, the main figurehead for the religion, and the last bastion of humanity. The human species is on the brink of extinction, with the nation of Shuten being the last hope. As the founder, the player character (dubbed Rei Shimobe) is endowed with a spiritual connection to God and calls upon its power… but only when the story deems it so.
The “power of God” proves to be a flimsy plot device with inconsistent rules, allowing the writers to circumvent difficulties. Some lines of dialogue are a bit eye-rolling when they try to explain why Rei can’t use it whenever. Worse yet, some mysteries aren’t as well hidden, and the writers show their hand too easily, especially for players who are familiar with their prior games.
The main suspects are the five heads of the ministries of Justice, Health, Education, Science, and Security. Players are free to pursue any of the suspects, and doing so locks them into a story route until the arc is completed, and then they’re free to choose the next. It’s like choosing a robo master to battle, but instead, you’re committing to a genre grab-bag while putting Rei in ridiculous and tense situations.
Regrettably, the Shuten Order is a painfully low-budget project. They didn’t even bother with an English dub, and sometimes the English text doesn’t fit in the word boxes. Worse yet, Shuten Order’s ambitions are too great to fulfill its promises of being a multi-genre adventure game. Each of the routes or genres is not fleshed out enough and is the barest essentials. This wouldn’t be so bad if the chapters were short, but each one is roughly five hours long or more.
There was a lot of potential with the genre mixing, because despite the missteps in the storytelling and lapses of logic, the routes are cleverly written with unique mysteries within mysteries that toy with genre expectations. Each route and suspect represents a genre: Inugami, the Minister of Justice, has a scenario that unfolds like a courtroom thriller. Think something like Danganronpa or Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.
The boisterous Ushitora, the Minister of Health’s scenario, features interrogation and escape-room style challenges and puzzles that evoke the style of the Nonary Games trilogy. For fans of Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil, Manji Fushicho, the Minister of Security, has Rei continuously stalked by a funny-looking mascot-like character while searching for keys and solving puzzles in maze-like environments.
Choosing to investigate Teko Ion, the Minister of Science, locks players into a deadly terrorist attack with multiple shifting perspectives in a desperate fight for survival. Kokushikan, the Minister of Education, pits Rei in the most dangerous game of all: romance. She poisons Rei and must seduce the correct girl in exchange for an antidote, compounded with the fate of the world hanging by a thread.
As cool as some of these may sound on paper, they are woefully undercooked. Fushicho’s scenario especially disappoints with its sheer simplicity. The nephililm chasing Rei has a small vision cone, and the environments are small and basic. It manages to be less deep than the original Metal Gear on MSX. The only exciting parts are going back to Manji’s pathetic house and laughing at how she lives, and admiring her cool sentient motorcycle.
The rest of the scenarios fall victim to overall low-budget cheapness, and a lot of it is due to Shuten Order’s concept being too big for itself. The dating game route is also too easy. All dates climax with a situation with Rei has to pick a couple of dialogue choices, and getting too many wrong makes you start over. There is usually some time pressure aspect to some of the scenarios where there are limited actions, but the choices are obvious enough that it’s never an issue.
Other routes don’t fare much better, as they are streamlined to facilitate an overarching story. It would have been preferable if Shuten Order focused on doing one gameplay style as well as it could instead of spreading itself thinly and doing five sloppily. If Shuten Order had to commit to one of the gameplay styles, it should have been the escape room-style because it had the best puzzles and fit the tone of the story best.
The biggest shame is that Shuten Order has a compelling and original mystery that sucks you in. The driving question and the twists and turns will keep you guessing and wondering who you can trust. The main suspects are the stars of the game, and they are fun to learn about with their character quirks. Manji being a failure at life is funny. Inugami, the drug addict, is tragic. Ion… you wanna choke the little guy.
Everyone gets their moment to shine, and connecting with each one to try to probe them leads to some amusing situations. It’s a bit long-winded at times, but it’s fitting since Rei is trying to rush to solve a mystery and can’t let anyone know what’s going on, which in turn puts the player in the same headspace. Considering its pedigree, Shuten Ordern should have been a lot better, but its limited resources and ambitious promise hamstring it.
Shuten Order was reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 using a code provided by Spike Chunsoft. Additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy is here. Shuten Order is now available for Windows PC (via STEAM) and Nintendo Switch.
