SHINRAI - Broken Beyond Despair

An incredibly charming detective game, which has some surprising twists and turns along the way in addition to some rather impressive character work. I seriously was impressed with some of the red herrings and bad ending choices, as they are all set up and seem like realistic possibilities. I also loved some of the characters, while a few fall into common anime tropes, a majority of the cast defies expectations (Kamen best girl btw). I'm super excited to check out the additional recent release expanding on the story!

To be completely honest, I didn't really think this game would be that good at first. I just wanted to see it through to pass some time and say that I finished yet another game, since I made it this year's goal to play some games I never touched before. However, Shinrai made me eat my words. Once the story *truly* picks up, Shinrai becomes an amazing story that makes you second guess the things that even you thought you knew about the game. The characters react in a somewhat-realistic way to high-stress situations, given that all of them are teenagers, and seeing how they act towards one another, given their circumstance, is really fun to see. Again, even if the mystery itself is good, the characters are the true stars of the game. Even if they are somewhat "trope-ey", I can't say I truly disliked any of them. Their speech patterns get annoying at times, but all of them play an important role to the story at large, and you can feel that all of them know each other and have realistic relationships to one-another. I'm not the best at this recommendation thing, but all in all, Shinrai is a great game with a good story and characters that I would very much recommend playing if you want to spend a couple hours of your weekend figuring out a mystery.

If you're searching for a good mystery game to test your deductive skills, SHINRAI is definitely the game for you! The game's quite short but also elaborated enough to let you immerse first of all in the setting of the game and then, most importantly, to let you really understand its cast: a group of teens that only want to enjoy a cool and fun Halloween party. SHINRAI not only has a very good mystery to uncover, but also lays its foundations on the cast's relationships with one another and the multitude of facets that a middle schooler could develop during those years of their life; how they often "don't know any better", and how some behaviors can affect the people around them in more ways than they hope or imagine. I'm writing this because I also think that the game's story and murder couldn't work as well as they do if the cast was composed by adults. Aside from this, the writing can appear as somewhat "cringe" in some parts, something that I found a bit too much only in regards to the adults of the cast (which are very few and peripheral). The game's art is good and the music did its work in setting up the mood of every scene, I also quite appreciated that there are a lot of different CGs here and there throughout the story! Having played GENBA no Kizuna too, I retroactively enjoyed its SHINRAI cameos even more, while others left me shocked (I finally saw Kikai's son! But I also understood the aftermath of Hiro's misunderstanding of Runa and the lenght of his egomaniac kid shenanigans...). I think SHINRAI's ending left me a more bittersweet taste compared to GENBA, which I think is a win considering the topics presented during the game. In conclusion, I highly recommend SHINRAI for its well-crafted and interesting mystery... but also for its cast. Don't let the cringe bits fool you, that bunch of middle schoolers can really learn more than one lesson while facing something far more serious than what their daily live up to that point had presented them with.