Before theDanganronpafranchise as we know it came to be, before the series even made its debut in the form of the PSP titleDanganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, there was once a game of a severely, severely grittier persuasion. It was known only as DISTRUST (that’s the first time and last time we capitalize the name, we swear).
Kazutaka Kodaka, the mastermind behind the Danganronpa series, first pitched Distrust to Japanese studio Spike (nowSpike Chunsoft) as a"psycho shock"visual novel; in stark contrast toother murder mystery gamesbeing released in 2009, Distrust would grind rough-hewn horror elements into the long-established mystery genre, resulting in a pulpy if not gore-splattered playing experience.
Spike ended up rejecting the Distrust project on account of its being “too gruesome,” as explained by Kodaka in aninterview with Polygon. A couple of elements did make it out of Distrust alive, only to be reworked into what eventually became Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, but the overall aesthetic of Distrust and its unique gameplay mechanic ended up being scrapped wholesale, never to surface in any successive Danganronpa release since. Now, however, another game has stepped up to revive that ‘Distrust’ spirit. Allow me to introduce to you Your Turn To Die -Death Game By Majority-.
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Developed by Japanese manga artist Nankidai, Your Turn To Die first emerged as an episodicfreewarehorror mystery visual novel in 2017. Adedicated English translationof Your Turn To Die was released in 2019 by vgperson, and that game isnow available on Steamthrough the Early Access program.
Your Turn To Die concerns the co-ed Sara Chidouin, who is knocked out and kidnaped along with her best friend Joe Tazuna while coming home from school one night. When the two wake up, they find themselves in some unknown place along with eight other people in the same predicament. Uncertainty turns to cold, hard fear, however, when one of their kidnapers reveals themselves and explains, in no uncertain terms, that if Sara, Joe, and the others want to escape, they must all take part in adrum roll pleaseDeath Game By Majority.
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Many have hailed Your Turn To Die as a spiritual successor to the Danganronpa series, pointing out surface-level similarities such as the premise (high-schoolers forced to play a death game) and the genre (death game, visual novel). But venture into Your Turn To Die and you’ll find that, with its mix of horror anyd myster in equal measure, it has even more in common with Danganronpa’s predecessor Distrust. In Your Turn To Die, as in Distrust, gore is not shied away from in the slightest: within the first hour of the game, one of the characters is brutally beheaded, and the severance doesn’t happen off-screen, either.
The blood that flows in Your Turn To Die is a grisly, realistic red — the same realistic red once splattered all over Distrust. Preliminary screenshots and concept art for the Distrust project indicate that Kodaka and his team had originally envisioned each drop of the in-game blood to appear a deeply crimson red. But this, too, was changed when Distrust was reworked into Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc — as Danganronpa fans will know all too well, today, the series is almost famous for its luridly unrealistic hot-pink blood.
Your Turn To Die does feature a wider, brighter spectrum of colors than Distrust, which was hashing itself out to be a dark time visually through a sparse use of color and an oppressive abundance of blackout shadows, all washed out with a blood-red tint.
Nevertheless, Your Turn To Die deftly merges its bright palette with plenty of thematic grit. Backgrounds are rendered rough by cross-hatching; character sprites are a few solid colors outlined in shockingly dark lines of ink. Indeed, all those blackout shadows once glimpsed in Distrust’s character and scene art are back with a vengeance in Your Turn To Die, contrasting with the game’s brighter colors to evoke the ‘psycho shock’ aesthetic that Kazutaka Kodaka had intended for Distrust.
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Visual similarities aside, where Your Turn To Die most echoes Distrust is in its ‘Main Game,’ an in-game game of lies and cards that its characters are forced to play at the end of each investigative segment. In this Main Game, several characters (including the player character Sara) are given a role card which they must not reveal to anyone else. Through rhetoric and bluffing, the characters must convince each other — and you — that they do genuinely possess the card they claim to possess. Truth and deception collide in the Main Game, and as Sara, the player must ultimately cast a vote based on which of the characters they trust — or distrust.
Distrust’s core tenet was its Trust/Distrust mechanic which, as outlined inUnseen64.net’s coverage, would have required players to earn the trust (or distrust) of its characters, while also sifting through testimony and evidence to determine which characters to trust, and which characters to, well,distrust. In practice, this mechanic would have influenced the survivability of certain characters, while also directly causing the mortality of others. This is an outcome that Your Turn To Die’s own trust-based system also results in: depending on whom you choose to trust during the Main Game, certain characters are spared death while others are made to die.
It is a fascinating mechanic, and one that Your Turn To Die expertly executes (if you’ll pardon the pun). To date, there are no Danganronpa games which allow you to make such pivotal choices as this. The one Danganronpa game thatwouldhave done so would’ve been Distrust.
Distrust may have been left to die on the cutting-room floor, but Your Turn To Die is very much real and very much playable today, either via Steam or online for free. Giving us all the tone, subject matter, and even the trust mechanic of the never-released Distrust, Your Turn To Die perfectly occupies the void left behind by the Danganronpa game that we never got.
