Shuten Order puts you in the shoes of Rei, who awakens one day with amnesia. In short order, she learns that she's in a cult-run city known as Shuten, she is the founder of the Shuten Order, and she was brutally murdered. Two angels appear and inform her that she was granted a chance by God to solve her own murder, kill her murderer, and return to the world of the living. The only problem is that she has only a few days to do this, the murderer is one of the ministers who run the city, and the Shuten Order preaches that the power of God is a heresy punishable by death. Now Rei must solve her own murder without anyone discovering that she's being helped by a higher power.

There are unfortunately a few things dragging down the story. One is that the non-linear nature of how you'll approach the storytelling means the game can't properly foreshadow things that will be revealed later because it doesn't know whether you know it yet. Depending on the order you do routes, you might get a big reveal and then be bombarded on other routes by foreshadowing the reveal you already know but nobody can respond to. This gets worse in later chapters, when you've probably figured out every reveal and are just waiting for the conclusion. This was a problem in games like Last Defense Academy, but that had a much larger variety in stories and characters.

Additionally, the translation quality is rather poor. My understanding is that it has been patched since its release, but there are still a bunch of issues. Text frequently goes out of the speech bubbles and sometimes goes off-screen entirely. There are some nonsensical lines of dialogue, and the game is inconsistent about when it uses "he" and "she" for characters. This actually matters when Rei's gender (and who is aware of it) is a notable plot point. It's possible to play through the game and get all the plot beats, but it really feels like it needed more QA.

The game is divided into five sections, each based around one of the ministers, and each with its own subgenre, such as "multi-perspective mystery" or "survival horror." You pick one at the start of your quest and play it from start to finish. You need to play all five ministries to unlock the final chapter, but you can approach them in any order you want.

The first, the Ministry of Justice, is basically a small-scale Danganronpa-style game. You venture to an isolated island for the reading of a will, and that's when a series of grisly murders start occurring. You need to gather clues, press inconsistencies, and eventually defend your findings at a daily meeting. Of the five modes, this is one of the better developed ones, possibly due to it just having one play style. The mysteries are a bit silly, but I found it engaging.

The second, the Ministry of Health, is a "death game" where you have to solve a series of fiendish puzzles to escape murder at the hands of a vtuber. This is the worst of the lot in a number of ways. Rather than genuine tension, you walk from cut scene to cut scene, occasionally pausing to solve a basic puzzle. There are almost no choices to make about who lives and dies, and there are relatively few bad ends to experience. It gets worse on the third "day," which is literally walking down a hallway for a while before a relatively fun escape room sequence. This is also where the translation seems weakest, with a number of lines vanishing off the edge of the screen.

The third, the Ministry of Science, has you getting trapped in an underground animal preserve while a group of terrorists attack. This is easily the strongest of the lot as you'll swap between multiple characters, needing to make correct choices in order to allow everyone to make it near the end. There are some cool plot twists, some really likable characters, and in general I found myself wishing the entire game was done like this. It's also one of the longest routes which helps give its cast more time to shine.

The Ministry of Education is framed as a romance story, where Rei has to earn the love of three different girls before convincing the Minister of Education to speak to her. Like most of the other routes, this is basic. You'll watch a number of cut scenes where you learn about the girl in question and then need to do a straightforward "talking" minigame where you make the right choices so they're happy. There's technically a time limit in this segment, and it grows tougher with each passing day because the previous girls will get jealous unless you also visit them. That said, the time limit is so generous that I'm not even sure it's technically possible to hit it, especially since it takes no time at all to woo the girl you're currently chasing. It's a somewhat funny route but feels rather tedious by the end.

The last route, the Ministry of Security, is probably the most distinct of the modes. Rather than a visual novel, it puts you in direct control of Rei as she tries to escape from a crazed, drill-wielding, costumed individual. This is a stealth/horror game where you have to sneak around the vision cone of the killer while collecting clues and solving puzzles. It's a neat change of pace from the other modes, but it's also incredibly simplistic. The killer is almost never a threat, and most of the puzzles are very basic. It picks up a little near the end, but it still feels like it is lacking something.

I think that is Shuten Order's biggest issue. It's a jack of all trades, master of none. Any of the individual game modes feels like they could've made a game out of it, but the truncated and basic versions for all means that the game modes end just as they're getting going. The actual plot twists and story are engaging and fun, but the presentation feels more like a gimmick than an asset, and I wished they'd stuck to one idea instead of five less-developed ideas.

Shuten Order has some nice, high-quality artwork, but the narrative is mostly told through rather simple static cut scenes. It's clearly working on a budget, but it makes a lot out of it, and there's a nice variety of character designs and concepts. Likewise, the soundtrack is quite good and contains a lot of excellent tracks that set the mood for various adventures. There's no English voice acting for those who need it, but the Japanese voice actors are excellent, particularly the ones who have to convey several different characters at once.

Overall, Shuten Order is a reasonably fun visual novel that's been let down by a needless gimmick and some poor localization. The core mystery, even if it drags in some places, is pretty fun and engaging, and it's easily the thing that kept me pushing forward. It's lacking the "home run" feel of Last Defense Academy, but if you can get past its warts, you'll have a good time.

Score: 7.0/10