Death Becomes You PC Game Review 2/10 "Perhaps I’m just not the right person to be writing about anime magical lesbian teenagers" 👧 @pixelhunted @quill_studios #IndieGame #GameDev

Perhaps I’m just not the right person to be writing about anime magical lesbian teenagers.

As I sat on the London Underground playing Death Becomes Her on my Switch I became intensely aware of the passengers on either side of me. Before this moment I’d never been self-conscious about gaming in public - why the hell should I care what some random strangers think of me? But I realized a glance at my screen would show two canoodling cartoon schoolgirls. Let’s face it, this is a powerfully bad look for a middle-aged man.

Let’s rewind a little. I’d never say I was a fan of visual novels but I’ve had some fun times with them. Bizarre avian dating simulator Hatoful Boyfriend is nothing if not memorable, Doki Doki Literature Club has a genuine claim as one of the best horror games of all time, and I’ve even delved into the Japan-only (and Hideo Kojima produced!) Tokimeki Memorial Drama Series. Heck, while we’re on the Kojima train Snatcher and Policenauts are visual novels and some of my favorite games of all time.

So a murder mystery visual novel in which you try to find out who pushed your best friend off a roof? Sure, I’ll bite.

It immediately becomes apparent that Death Becomes You is far more a novel than a game. I was hoping for a complex branching storyline that’d let me investigate the crime scene, gather clues, and interrogate suspects. But by the end of one full playthrough, I’d made just five or six binary choices, with the meat of the game tapping 'confirm' to advance through non-interactive conversations. There are 13 endings and I scored about half of them before calling it quits. So, if Death Becomes Her is lacking on the gameplay, how’s the story?

You play as Sidney, a damp dishrag of a lead character who’s been emotionally manipulated by the dead friend she’s out to avenge. Slowly realizing the murder victim wasn’t the perfect darling Sidney had assumed her to be is theoretically interesting, though the game doesn’t satisfactorily explore this, focusing instead on her passively observing her schoolfriends groping each other in unlockable ‘CG’ scenes (helpfully available for close perusal after the fact via the menu).

There are just four other characters to interact with, each slotting neatly into an anime girl archetype: the horny ditz, the clever horny bookworm, the outgoing (plus horny) confident one, and the cold and reserved (but secretly totes horned up) older girl. As the binary selections between chapters are the limits of the game’s interactivity you don’t interact with these characters so much as read about them, though there’s little to get intrigued about.

Beyond that there’s limited art and animation, a handful of backgrounds and the score seems to play one song (Apolline’s Theme) over and over again. Maybe a little more seriously it also managed to glitch out to a grey screen with file names listing the graphics that were supposed to have been loaded. This is a VN with extraordinarily limited interaction and not that much art - that even this doesn’t function perfectly ain’t great.

At this point, it was clear that Death Becomes You is not for me. In fact, it shares much more in common with a typical romance paperback than a murder mystery video game, right down to the repetition of the same tropes and character types in the rough order readers are anticipating. But, just as in Mills & Boon, this formula delivers something its fans want - and judging by the glowing reviews elsewhere its target audience is clearly very happy with this sugar-coated softer-than-soft lesbian romance. The writers even lampshade this at one point, saying “It’s just an erotica. No one reads those for the plot”.

SUMMARY

Maybe it’s simply not fair for me to judge whether Death Becomes You is good or bad. After all, it may be functionally impossible for me to appreciate the game’s theoretical merits. 

On the other hand, I was bored to death throughout and consumed with embarrassment about the whole cartoon lesbian schoolgirl thing.

So, in summary: BAD.