As a fan of the Danganronpa games I was really hoping Rain Code would be good. Unfortunately I can't recommend it, and not just as a Danganronpa successor. This is simply not a good game.

Rain Code has a lot of problems that I could discuss in detail, but for the sake of this review being short enough that people might actually read it, here are the main points:

• The writing for the mysteries ranges from sub-par to very bad. None of the mysteries are what I would describe as "good." They are extremely convoluted and make no sense as actual crimes that someone would ever commit.
  
• The mystery-solving part of the game is incredibly hand-holdy and slow. It also suffers from an issue where it very frequently presents multiple correct answers but only accepts the one that the writers wanted you to choose in that moment.
  
• The characters are more like caricatures. Most of them have catchphrases that get very old very quickly, and they do not remotely feel or act like real people.
  
• The game attempts to have some theme about "truth" or whatever, but it completely loses the plot from pretty much the first moment that the theme is introduced, and continues to fail in its attempts to follow through on that theme for the entirety of the game.
  
• It pulls all kinds of superficial elements from the Danganronpa series (mostly around gameplay, but some aesthetic and structural elements as well), but seems to completely misunderstand what actually made those things work in Danganronpa. It feels more like a bad Danganronpa-inspired fan game than an actual successor.
  
• Overall, it was just a slog to play. I was invested during parts of the first 20 hours or so. The other 20 hours was just trying to finish it.

If you're a Danganronpa fan looking for a new Danganronpa game, this is not it. If you're a fan of the detective/mystery genre looking for something else in that genre to play, play Danganronpa instead. Rain Code is seriously not worth your time.

Comparing this to Danganronpa, the game is a disappointment. Characters are less interesting, the pacing is significantly slower, and the overall pervy-ness is much higher. The mysteries themselves are pretty neat, but they lack the kind of personal connection the mysteries in Danganronpa had, since pretty much every victim and killer is introduced during the case.

It's not terrible, but after doing the first two mysteries, I'm finding it really hard to want to continue.

This is a solid 'meh' game so it's hard to decide between recommending it or not, but I think I'd rather not have people buying it because of me.

Halfway through the game, I was thinking of doing an extensive review for this game, I had all the flaws noted and I was going to write all of them here for no one to read. But of course it's a Spike game and the finale has to be good.

Look, I have played every mainline Danganronpa and Zero Escape games and I love them all, I have even been replaying the Danganronpa games recently. I did not like it when they went full ecchi humor for Somnium Files and I almost left them unplayed, but after many years I recently decided to trust Spike, played them, and now they might even be my favourites.

So I thought: ok, this is going to be the same, rough start until I get used to this being an anime of the worst kind, then I'm going to love the characters and the plot and I'm going to forgive any flaw. Yeah, not this time.

Two thirds of the game are filler cases which do not contribute to the classic final reveal in the slightest, with throwaway characters and obvious plottwists. Danganronpa did also have one or two filler cases per game, but here it feels like the whole game is filler until it suddenly isn't, and we're talking about the 20-hour mark.

Look, if you don't mind the ecchi and you really want to play something from Spike go ahead and buy it, but don't expect to love it as you probably did with all their previous work. And if I can give a word of advice in case you do, don't bother with the side quests, they're trash.

Let me start this review off by saying that I don't regret purchasing RAIN CODE Plus. But it's also not worth full price at all. A Danganronpa, this is not, even though it tries so very hard to be.

It's definitely a Spike Chunsoft game. That's for sure. You have your murders, your mysteries, and your trademark annoyingly lewd character.

So let's talk about the characters. They're poor. They just don't feel inventive enough. Danganronpa's characters might not always have been groundbreaking, but at least they were enjoyable in their clichés. The problem is, you just don't really get to spend any time with these characters whatsoever. Danganronpa works because it's the same cast all throughout, a cast that gets thinner and thinner, so you get to know the characters better and better. That's not the case in RAINCODE Plus. You get your one companion character per chapter, and they are only ever their one gimmick in that chapter, and nothing outside that gimmick.

That could work if the gimmicks were enjoyable. While I might not have loved characters like Kyoko, Himiko or Hiyoko in the Danganronpa games, some like Nagito, Kokichi, Gundam, and Hajime were smash hits for me. There is no such smash hit character in this game. The best it gets is "meh, I guess it's okay," and the worst it gets is by far Perv Boy, whose name I've entirely forgotten.

Spike Chunsoft always has lewd characters and humour. It doesn't always hit, but it's something I usually tolerate decently well. Not this guy. This guy is by far the worst. At the very least, other pervy characters usually kept it to their own age group. Not this guy. And you have to spend an entire chapter at an all girls school with him, so I think you can get where this is going. Even ignoring any moral concerns, he's just really grating.

The other characters aren't that bad, but they're just kind of there. They range from annoying to mildly likeable.

So, if not for the characters, you'd play this game for the mysteries, right? And I'm afraid I don't have the greatest news there either, including one of the genuinely worst mysteries I've ever seen. Embarrassingly bad.

The Danganronpa trials are replaced by a Mystery Labyrinth, which is decently enjoyable, but really hammers home the lack of character interaction in this game, since it's just you, your main companion, and your sidekick for that chapter. And while your main companion is fiiiine - though heavily leaning on the "lewd Spike Chunsoft character. I genuinely laughed at how obviously hornybait a lot of her animations are - 2 out of the 5 sidekicks are rather annoying, and the other 3 aren't anything to write home about.

Let's start off with Chapter 1 - or Chapter 0 as it's called in this game.

It's a fairly decent start, and it's actually the only chapter in the entire game that surprised me with the direction of the case. While some other chapters might have had some surprising details, this was the only one to really catch me off guard with where it went. And the mystery in it feels the most like a standard elaborate Danganronpa style mystery that you'll get in this game, taking advantage of the new setting in a fairly interesting way. Plus, you don't have to deal with any annoying characters here.

Chapter 2 is then possibly the single worst murder mystery I've ever seen. It's definitely fighting for that title with the second case of The Great Ace Attorney. It's not nearly as aggravating as that one, but it's almost worse: It's boring. So incredibly boring. The mystery is split up into 4 different mini-mysteries, but this just causes each of them to be so simplistic as to be dull. And spoiler warning here, but it really doesn't matter since you will NOT care about this case the murderer, or should that be murdererS, is/are an unnamed character. Not a character you don't know, but a character that never gets given a name. Same with all the victims, and even the 'defendant'. Even if you want to care about what happens, which I do, it's impossible. I care less about these characters then I do about someone halfway across the world sneezing. If this case didn't exist, nothing about the game would change. Hell, it would probably be better.

Chapter 3 starts a weird trend this game has. Before we enter the mystery labyrinth/trial part, I'd have some idea of where the case is going to go, and I'd think to myself "Oh, it would be really cool if the game did X!" And then the game goes out of the way to say "Nope, it's not X," despite X being an infinitely more entertaining way for the case to go. In this chapter, that was suicide. I had hoped that the victim in this case was actually also the culprit, taking a 50/50 chance at killing her hated rival, or succumbing herself. That would have been really cool, but the game goes out of its way to tell me it's not that, as if realising that there was a chance for something more interesting, but taking it away. Instead, it's just the generic and predictable path. It's not bad, but it's very mid.

Chapter 4 is decent enough. I have nothing bad to say about it, except that, once again, the game realises that there's a more interesting way for the case to go, and refuses to take it.

Chapter 5 is where the game starts actually justifying its existence past the first chapter, and yet, it's really not all that great. It's fine, but compared to the Danganronpa Chapter 5s? It doesn't hold a candle. Maybe it's better than Danganronpa 1's Chapter 5, but considering how this came AFTER the excellent Danganronpa 2 & V3's chapter 5s, this really has no excuse to be as 'okay' as it is. I am happy that we finally get a case where the murderer is someone who's willing to die for their murder.

Chapter 6 is then completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane. Sure, Danganronpa's Chapter 6s usually are like that, but this goes beyond that. The Danganronpa games have some kind of foreshadowing for their insanity, but not RAINCODE Plus. Technically, it's there, but I don't think I could have ever expected the exact way that RAINCODE Plus was going to implement that insanity. I'd say it's good, even if the investigation is a little too obvious on the details - they had to cram way too much explanation into it, since the foreshadowing is lacking. It also has one really cool part where it actually uses the player's previous understanding of Danganronpa against them, and that was by far the best part of the game.

What else do I have to say? The minigames weren't awful. No Hangman's gambit ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in here.

Get it if it's on sale for like €20 or less. It's not worth more.

Absolutely would not get this at full price ($60????). Excruciatingly paced and some of the worst mysteries of anything from the Danganronpa devs.

Feels like the game drags on way to long esp if you do side missions that feel utterly useless, the only pro is shingami but sadly she has morganna energy from P5. There is a good story kinda here if your willing to put in 30 ish hours in with remedial gameplay

(Personal opinion and no spoilers) Danganronpa is a great series and this shouldn't be directly compared to it, even though much of this will seem like me comparing the two, however there are obviously some expectations coming from the same creator. If you can possibly see yourself aligning your thinking with my own, this game may not be for you. I bought it regardless to support the creator. I'm only 10 hours into the game and the game is an estimated 30 hours if you focus on the main story only, which I am probably going to start doing.

A majority of the characters I have met so far (which are the ones in the steam cover image + some antagonists) just don't have that much going on for them. I didn't have much interest in getting to know them. Not to mention the designs feel like they were created in a danganronpa random character generator online. They seem randomly spiced together in the same cyberpunkish style without their own theme and do not tickle my brain in the slightest. On a side note, some characters have their expectations set by other characters before we even meet/get to know them, like "this guy is so evil... gulp..." which sets the bar high, and then they turn out to just be some simple dude with one quirk to them.

The danganronpa mystery-solving style combined with a concept that appears to take inspiration from Persona 5's palaces is a unique and interesting way of going about it. Instead of having class trials, you enter a Mystery Labyrinth which is its own little non-euclidean pocket dimension thing and is a personified version of the mystery itself. This means exploring down a long unending hallway until you are presented with a room/activity meant to solve a specific truth of the investigation, and also encountering "mystery phantom" (shadow) versions of the antagonists. The debate you usually have where you shoot the words in danganronpa is replaced with a sort of dodge-and-weave minigame where you dodge the opponent's words, and when the orange statement text shows up, you can select a key (instead of a truth bullet) to slash those words and do the classic "No that's wrong" splash image thing. It's a fun concept, but it feels like it becomes too easy, especially with all the upgrades you can get on the skill tree. On top of barely taking any damage you can shield yourself. The game doesn't have a (real) difficulty setting. This makes it even less motivating to invest any skill points on the skill tree since it's already so forgiving (which also makes it less motivating to do side quests for random people which give you skill points, unless you want to do it purely for the story). Your health bar will basically never reach zero, or even halfway, unless you really try, and this goes for the other minigames in the labyrinth which deplete your health if you fail.
Which is another thing I would like to bring up. There are many questions in the labyrinth you run into which are one of two answers, or a true or false. If you guess wrong, it only takes off a sliver of health and then you get to just choose the other one. There is no challenge at all for these moments which are meant to be tense revelations.
On a good note each labyrinth is customized to match that chapter's mystery with its own little map areas. But other than that, depending on who you are, the labyrinth can drag on and on. Not to mention some of the minigames feel like you are doing the investigation again. The final castle siege part at the end got old for me after only the first time, realizing I will have to do it again for each mystery. For the closing argument it practically gives you the answers, and then you have to sit through the longest replay of the events ever possibly constructed (even while holding the skip button, it barely speeds it up).
I'm going to have to spoiler the end of chapter 0 to give my complaint on what happens when you solve a mystery finally: Once you complete the labyrinth, it has an effect on the culprit in the real world. Persona 5 makes them have a change of heart and confess to their crimes, as there would be no other way to prove who the real culprit is due to their position of power. However, in this game the person just dies each time. This leads to no changes in the situation of framing at all, and why would it? The only way the real culprit is captured after that is because of some lucky timing of another character coming to save the day. And knowing this is going to happen when you complete a labyrinth makes it feel like it's not worth it from the beginning. Maybe something else is going on behind the scenes I haven't discovered yet with Shinigami being a god of death and all but we will see

About the mysteries themselves, so far the culprits you search for have been literal who's, rather than your own allies you have gotten to know over time. This makes it less engaging for me personally. The investigations feel like they go on and on. The added bloatware to dialogue from Shinigami just makes it feel even longer. Also, the methods of killing feel so weird and lame to me, not in the good weird way you would expect but they just seem so random and convoluted for no reason. Rather than someone trying to get away with murder, it feels like you are solving an escape room someone deliberately set up for an ice breaker challenge between your coworkers at your white collar job. If danganronpa had a cliche in a trial, it was always because of something secret happening behind the scenes which is revealed at the end in a satisfying twist (Some examples, all danganronpa game spoilers: sayaka was originally trying to attack leon, peko does not see herself as an individual human but as a tool to her master which is why she didn't think it would count her as the culprit, kirumi killed the midget in order to escape since she's secretly the prime minister of japan which she found out from a motive video, and after telling the midget this he basically hinted toward letting her kill him for the sake of the country since he already had a deathwish). These mysteries have nothing interesting going on behind the scenes, it's just people doing stuff. The lack of background knowledge about the suspects cuts off any interesting development and there is no depth. It's just a bunch of people saying "I didn't do it" and then yep one of them did it. Or maybe two. There are no layers to it and there is no satisfaction at the end, I am just glad it's over. There is some lampshading too, like the protagonist saying "This seems very cliche" in certain situations when something cliche just happened.

People complain about Shinigami, which I do not mind her that much, but she is a bit of a two trick pony. Edgy jokes and fanservice. In her human form I got tired of her constant forceful presentation of her boobs in my anime face. She takes up a lot of time giving her input on things and breaking the fourth wall like I'm watching that mystery science theater 3000 thing. This is only roughly half of the time though, she has that explorer-companion feel a lot of the time with some good delivery. On that note I wholeheartedly believe that if she were a shirtless black man of a muscular nature the character would be a lot more entertaining/memorable and feel like more of a companion with a sense of empowerment.

I haven't finished the game yet so I will update it if something changes, I have my expectations high because I know the creator has it in him for a twist that will make me jump around like a mexican watching dragon ball. I believe in him.

I am not a hater; I have played and enjoyed a lot of games on Rain Code's family tree. Some of them I liked (Danganronpa 1/2, the various Ace Attorneys, Somnium Files), some I loved (Danganronpa V3), some I REALLY REALLY loved (Zero Escape 1/2/3). So I am quite bummed about how much I don't like Rain Code.

It's just not very fun to play. The player character is the most "confused amnesiac child whose only character trait is not understanding anything" imaginable, and every exchange of dialog goes on about 3 times longer than it probably should. This is one of my biggest problems with this game, so I want to really hammer it home: Everyone in this game talks so much, and repeats everything all of the time. Nothing is said once that can be said 5 times.

It's not that there's nothing here to like - it LOOKS incredible, the visual style of the city is off the charts, and there were some cool "a-ha" moments during the "solve the case" segments.

But it's less than the sum of its parts, and the sum of its parts already isn't very good. The Chapter 2 case is conceptually cool but the solution is completely obvious right away, and then you still have to spend like 2-3 hours going through the motions of having your guy go "HUH???! WHUH?!?!" as he slowly figures it out. All of chapter 3 could have been cut without the game being any worse for it. I think it might actually literally be true that nothing that happens in that chapter has any bearing at all on the rest of the game, and the case itself is such a weaksauce pile of nothing that I'm still a little mad about it.

Unlike the Danganronpa games, this one actually has an antagonist whose motives make sense and who you might even catch yourself sympathizing with. It is a shame, then, that more than half of this game is made of disconnected murder cases that do not dovetail into any kind of bigger picture, and so this antagonist really only has any real presence during the last bits of the very final chapter (which, the final chapter is also bad. Most of the non-trial bits of this game are "walk to the yellow exclamation mark on the map", but the final chapter really takes that to new heights).

The "side quests" (massive sarcasm quotes) are pointless and boring, and if you do play this game, you should feel enormously free to ignore all green exclamation/question marks on the map. They are painfully uninteresting. They're also incredibly short though, so I guess that cancels out.

I was going to write something about how poorly written the game's conclusion and epilogue are, but I don't think I need to say anything more to get my opinion across. I regret giving into the sunk cost fallacy and actually playing this game all the way through, instead of playing something better and more interesting instead.

I've only finished the 3rd case, about 1/4 of my playtime is afk. This game is not good. It has some good cases, particularly case 2 and the prologue (though cases 1 and 3 are meh at best), but the game itself is just simply not good, especially not for full price.

I like the idea of the 謎迷宮, but the execution is horrendous. It forces me to watch the same animations again and again and again and again and again and again and it's the exact same in every case. And if you mess something up, or even just miss-click, because obviously they're filled with quick time events, then yet again, you need to watch the same animations over and over again. It's mind-numbingly boring. The entire 推理 sequence would only take about 10-15 minutes if it weren't unnecessarily stretched to an hour with this unskippable waste of time. And seriously, QTEs? In 2024? So creative.

The game's most appealing aspect is its visual design, the city is undoubtedly beautiful and I've been having fun exploring it. The characters also look nice, though their personality is usually just a cardboard cliche at best. It is seriously frustrating that the game has created a bunch of cool looking characters just for them to be replaced quickly by a set of similarly good looking, but just as empty characters in the next case. Nonetheless, they're fine.

Except the main character, who's the dullest, most uninteresting character I've ever seen. Seriously, just why? Why can't someone like Yakou be the main character? Why does it have to be a seemingly 10-year-old kid with a squeaky voice, whose only personality trait is being confused by literally everything? Why does it have to be a kid? The game is filled with brutal murders and other adult topics.

Anyway, I'll finish it, but it's a struggle. Unless you're a hardcore Danganronpa fan, wait for a sale.

First, the nice parts. I am very happy that they created a new setting for this game. I was getting tired of the Danganronpa formula, and I find it refreshing to have a new world to discover. Roaming around the city to solve crimes feels more natural and less contrived than being captured and forced to play a twisted murder game. It also looks better, and is more dynamic.

Then, the annoyances. Starting with the Queen of Annoyance herself who is forced upon you as a sidekick. She follows you everywhere for the entire duration of the game and there's not a single thing she said or did that wasn't painful to watch. The main character is apparently unable to stand up for himself and refuse the endless stupidity thrown at him. In fact, just like in Danganrompa, and although there are many original characters with various personalities, the main character is a robot with no sense of humour, who is constantly confused about the simplest puzzles, and has no will of his own apart from the most basic things like protecting those around him, "helping others", and reacting to danger (I said he was a robot, those are the three laws of robotics, everything checks out).

If that was all, the game would still be pretty good overall and an improvement on the Dangonrompa series. But there are fatal flaws which affect the core of the game (solving mysteries), and this is why I cannot recommend it.

The mysteries are, most of the time, very simple. I'm not good with time estimation so I'm not sure about this, but I got the impression that the deduction parts of this game are shorter than Danganrompa's trials. However I'm pretty sure I felt less challenged by the puzzles. Danganrompa had a difficulty setting (with a separate one for logic an reflexes which is nice) but not in this game (there's only a fake choice).

One issue which was already in Danganrompa but feels worse here is in the 'reasonning death matches': you are presented with a series of statements and you need to break one of them with the correct argument. To be certain which statement to break you need to see all the statements since there are multiple statement/rebuttal pairs which make sense so you need to choose the one with the most straightforward logic. But when you arrive at the last statement, before going back to the beginning, the sidekick character basically tells you the solution in completely unsubtle hints.

Another problem is that it's sometimes hard to 'read the game's mind' when it asks questions in a roundabout way: even though you solved the puzzle you don't understand what the question is about or how to tell the game what you know. For instance at some point the game asks the same question twice in a row but requires different answers. And sometimes multiple answers are justifiably correct but the game only accepts one. To be honest this problem was more acute in the Danganrompa series and this kind of confusion doesn't happen so often in Rain Code, I think simply because there is less complexity.

But the truly unforgivable is: inconsistencies. Resolving inconsistencies is the most fundamental way to solve mysteries, because resolving them allows the detective to discard impossible scenarios and arrive at the truth. A game which directs the player's attention on its apparent contradictions has the duty to be particularly careful in avoiding unintentional inconsistencies! Those lead the player astray and weaken the credibility of the game's official solution. And Rain Code is full of them. They spoil half the game: Chapter 3 makes no sense whatsoever, Chapter 4's solution implies unreasonable levels of stupidity and there is a glaring contradiction in the ultimate mystery.