Yurukill: The Calumniation Games
Yurukill: The Calumniation games is a part visual novel, part point-and-click adventure and part Shooter, it’s a strange mashup of genres that don’t usually have any crossover whatsoever but here, it makes for a truly unique game.
Story
Yurukill starts off with us focusing on the character Sengoku, a youngish guy in his mid-twenties who has been sentenced to a prison sentence of 999 years for crimes he claims he did not commit. Sengoku wakes up to find himself, prisoner, aboard a ship along with other criminals. They are being transported to participate in the game Yurukill. The eccentric, kitsune mask-wearing overseer of the game, Binko explains that one of the prisoners will have the chance to have their crimes pardoned provided they survive the game.
Yurukill takes place in a giant, custom-built amusement park on par with Disney Land with each ‘attraction’ themed after the prisoner’s previously committed crimes.
Each prisoner is paired with an ‘executioner’ whom they must work with through each of these attractions. Each prisoner has an unremovable collar containing a poison which the paired executioner can remotely activate at a moment’s notice.
I won’t go into specifics due to spoilers. However, I will say each executioner has their own reasons for participating in the game and their role is to evaluate the prisoner and try to find out if they really did commit the crimes they were accused of in the first place.
Gameplay
The mashup of visual novel and shmup genres actually works pretty well, although I do admit, it does feel a little disjointed at times. Gameplay during the visual novel sections involves searching areas for clues, trying to escape rooms and solving puzzles all while under the watchful eye of your pair executioner.
Throughout the visual novel section, you’ll be asked multiple answer questions by your executioner, which they may or may not like the answer to. As things get more and more heated there’s a chance a sort of sudden death mode may trigger where you must talk your way out of a painful death via poison. These moments are tense and really do make you rack your brains on what exactly to say to avoid your demise.
Most of the puzzles are simple in nature, such as arranging items in a particular order to slightly more complex math-based puzzles. They get you thinking but they are not overly tough to figure out overall.
Once you have made it to the end of a particular attraction, with tensions flying high, both prisoner and executioner are put into a full-body type of VR system. Within this machine, you enter a ship, and the shooter portion of the game begins with our executioner serving as the end-of-level boss.
Before the level starts, you’ll have the opportunity to answer some quick shot questions which will serve as somewhat of a test and a recap of what you and your executioner have discussed so far. The number of questions you get right will dictate how many extra lives you get to play through the shooter section with, giving you extra incentive to pay attention, as if dying from a poison collar wasn’t enough.
The shmup sections are a lot of fun and the main goal is to survive three stages to defeat the boss and make them change their mind about you. These sections play out between each set of attractions with a total of 7 unique levels, and they all have different types of ships depending on which pair of prisoner & executioner you are playing as.
To begin with, I wasn’t sold on the presentation Yurukill as I thought the characters didn’t have enough ‘movement’ to them but over the course of the game, the character designs and subtly of the animation grew on me. The levels are colourful and very detailed, yet I found the menus and user interface a little lacking.
The Shmup sections are technically very good and remind me a little of something like the Raiden series or Ikaruga, although sadly, nowhere near as good.
That said, the shooter sections were made by G.Rev who actually co-developed Ikargua with developer Treasure and they have staff members who have worked on games such as G-Darius and RayStorm so they definitely know what they are doing when it comes to designing a competent shmup.
Conclusion
Yurukill is an interesting game that gets a lot right. The mix of visual novel and shmup work quite well even if it does feel a little jarring to go between both. The visual novel side of things does a great job of pulling the player in immediately, although the game feels a little front loaded and by that, I mean the more interesting stories and dynamics seem to take place in the early hours of the game with the narrative falling off a little, especially after chapter 7.
The shooter sections are great, and you can tell G.rev put a lot of love and care went into them, they are not just tacked-on sections and I was surprised at just how long and fleshed out they are, although I kind of wish the developers just made two separate games one great shooter and one above average visual novel. The old saying ‘jack of all trades, Master of none’ seems apt here and I feel like both the visual novel and shmup sides of the game suffer due to the constraints of each genre having to meld together.
7
Nintendo Switch review code kindly provided by NIS America
If you are interested, you can pick up a copy of Yurukill: The Calmniation games here
