Note: This has been summarized for brevity and focuses on the game's interactive elements. Spoiler Warning for Chapters 1 and 2, Trigger Warning for Death, Blood, and Gore.
OVERVIEW
Your Turn To Die -Death Game By Majority- (YTTD) is an episodic murder-mystery visual novel that follows high school student, Sara Chidouin, who is forced into a social deduction death game with other complex and wildly different participants. With their survival tied to voting by majority, how far will they go to secure their life?
KEY CHARACTERS
Sara Chidouin (Protagonist)
Sara takes on an older-sister role amongst the participants and tries to stay resilient and dependable. She pressures herself with the burden of helping everyone escape and her mental state worsens when she believes herself to be the cause of her best friend Joe's death.
Sou Hiyori (Antagonist)
Due to his distrust in others, Sou constantly questions others' motives and does things alone, thus seen as uncooperative and suspicious. When it is revealed that Sara's best friend Joe’s death is actually caused by Sou, most participants turn against Sou strongly.
STRONGEST INTERACTIVE ELEMENT
A few minigames / non-core interactions are extremely impactful on the game experience.
At the end of Chapter 2, Sara is given a button by the game master during the execution of her best friend Joe. Sara is told that pressing the button will slow the device killing Joe, and if she keeps pressing it, the device may even stop. At this point, the game goes into Sara’s POV and the player has to experience Joe’s death and Sara’s dilemma of pressing the button first-hand.
Even though this is all a cruel sham set by the game master and the player is unable to save Joe, this is one of the most impactful interactions in the game because the decision to press the button once, many times, or even not at all, is extremely tough to make. The button in the player’s hand causes them to now be actively involved in Joe’s death, no longer a bystander to this tragedy. The guilt of being unable to save Joe and possibly causing him a slower and more painful death continues to haunt the player and Sara.
In a later execution of another character, this interaction is brought back again, causing the player and Sara to recall the traumatic scene through mental association.
UNSUCCESSFUL INTERACTIVE ELEMENT
However, the reaction based point-and-click minigames in YTTD affect the player's emotional connection to the narrative.
The appearance of these minigames during climactic moments tend to break immersion rather than add to the anxiousness that the player feels. When the player fails these minigames, they can simply reload the game, reducing the emotional guilt or stress from failing these minigames and causing another character’s death. Additionally, the contradicting usage of these minigames reduced its effectiveness in eliciting an emotional reaction in the player.
In Chapter 1, this reaction-based minigame appeared when Sara was trying to save Gin and the stakes of clearing the minigame was to save another character’s life. However, the mental association to these minigames weakened significantly after appearing a lot in Chapter 2 as arcade games to complete for tokens with no real, immediate stakes and bordered the line of ridiculousness by featuring odd enemies to play against.
Most of these arcade games require the player to select one of the other characters as a game partner which changes the game difficulty and serves no other purposes. It is a wasted opportunity that could have served to increase the bond between Sara and the other characters.
In the same chapter as these arcade games are still on-going, this minigame appears during a climactic moment when Sara is trying to fight her hallucinations of Joe. As the mental association of this minigame is now associated with the arcade games, the seriousness of this moment is reduced and player immersion is broken.
REFERENCES
Lilia (2021) states that YTTD, unlike its peers, has a more realistic take on its characters by “demonstrating a far more accurate representation of loss as a result and giving characters arcs as they grieve and learn to move on from there.”
Regarding the gameplay however, Timothy (2021) explains that it is not without fault; where “some puzzles seem tacked on for no real reason other than adding more game time” and others have “nonsensical solutions which bog the game’s pace to a crawl”.
Game Title: Your Turn To Die -Death Game By Majority-
Platform: PC
Genre: Detective/Mystery, Horror
Release Date: August 28, 2017
Developer: Nankidai (ナンキダイ)
Publisher: RPG Atsumāru
Game Writer/Creative Director/ Narrative Designer: Nankidai (ナンキダイ)