I bought this more or less on impulse as it happened to be one of the featured 48-hour deals on steam a while ago, and it might just be the very first time steam helped me discover a game I liked.

This is pretty much my favourite deck-building roguelite since Slay the Spire - it does a few things quite differently that reward a more calculated approach to every fight which I greatly enjoyed (marked as spoiler just in case you wanna discover them yourself) You get a skill point for "precisely" killing an enemy (e.g doing 6 damage when the enemy has 6 hp left), you get a "block" if you defend a precise amount of damage (e.g 5 shield vs enemy doing 5 damage) which stuns the enemy for 1 turn, there's a combo system where using varied cards in a specific order gives you a "next card deals double damage" bonus, and there's a "mission" system rather than choosing your next path which you can complete at any given time during the rest of the run while being able to turn it in when necessary, so you won't be wasting that healing reward when you're at full health. Oddly enough, if I had found this game when it initially entered early access, I probably wouldn't have played it for more than 3-4 hours, as all the new things I enjoy in this game were added in a patch like a week prior to me buying it.

Unfortunately, this game also reignited my roguelite passion so I went back to replay some other roguelites and doing a pretty minimal amount of work on the backlog.

An improvement in pretty much every way compared to the first one (except that one "improved" minigame… you know who you are). If you played and enjoyed the first game, there's no reason not to get this one as well - and if you haven't, well… you definitely shouldn't be starting with this one.

I also liked the postgame minigame for some reason, which took up more time than I would've liked - not enough to play through it another 3 times to 100% the game though.

Fun fact: After the first trial, I figured I should play my own game and make a list of survivors to see how many I can get right. The results? Out of the 5 picks I had, 4 were killers and 1 was a victim. Whew, way to go, dumb Skatrzoo.

Gotta admit, I haven't played this when it was originally released so it was a "fresh" experience for me. I don't usually play point n clicks (I played less than… 5?), but I enjoyed the humour in this one.

Now the sequel on the other hand…

…was ruined by having that stupid speedrunning achievement. Really? A speedrun achievement in a point n click? I had no intention of going through this game twice and not having that one achievement would've mildly annoyed me (I'm not even an achievement hunter…), so I ended up using a guide throughout this whole game. So much for discovering stuff on my own, I guess…
Anyway, the game itself was still just about as good as the first one, but my personal experience with it was, well, pretty much the complete opposite of what a "game" should be.

If you know anything about Danganronpa, you know they generally have a pretty messed up story. This one somehow manages to be a lot more messed up, to the point where it would've likely not been on Steam if it had the actual graphic content instead of just text describing certain things.

Still, I liked the story as you can see what happens to various characters that you've been told about in the first game, so if you have questions in regards to events that happened after Danganronpa 1, this game will answer some of them for you. Do note that you should absolutely not touch this if you haven't played through both Danganronpa 1 & 2, as this spinoff pretty much spoils everything from both games.

The gameplay itself isn't anything to write home about, as it's a fairly basic third person shooter with some puzzles here and there. My biggest gripe with it wasn't that, though, it was the fairly annoying save system they put in place (I once had to replay about 35-40min because there was a massive gap between save points - no, you can't save anywhere you want if that's what you were wondering)

All in all, it's still a Danganronpa game, so if you've played the main games and want some more, you should consider this one as well.

In terms of production value, this is one of the better VNs I've tried out. A unique and vibrant aesthetic, animated sprites (talking, blinking, various other misc animations), a good soundtrack, renown voice actors (including people such as Ayane Sakura, Kirito of course he couldn't miss being in another isekai game, Eri Kitamura and many others)

In terms of the actual game… boy, oh boy…

I've managed to finish the prologue and a couple of chapters so far, and I have about 0 reasons to recommend the story for now. In the first 5 hours, I've probably seen the same recycled interaction between characters at least a dozen times, it's full of perverted "jokes", it has one of the most cliche and boring "trapped in a VR" settings I've seen, and they somehow managed to make even the choice picking annoying as hell. By which I mean, you don't get to just choose an answer and see the outcome, you have like 5 seconds to pick one from the various options scrolling off the screen. Took you more than 2 seconds to decide that the first option was probably the best? Tough luck, better choose another one that's still on the screen or reload your save.

All in all, this is one of the bigger disappointments I've had when it comes to VNs. I'd love to recommend this based on aesthetic alone, but unless you wanna read about 20-25 hours of "haha I like tiddies and I won't stop telling you about it xDDDDDDDD", I don't think you should be going anywhere near this. Probably doesn't help that the market's over-over-oversaturated with isekai garbage at this point. I'll probably give it a couple more chapters to see if there's any real story, but I doubt I'll end up reading this all the way through.

Also, achievements are semi-bugged in this one too (it's one of those games where they unlock only after you close the game)