Shuten Order, published by the Japanese game developer Spike Chunsoft, is a science fiction mystery thriller about gender, genre, and the Power of God. At the center of the plot is the murder of the Founder of the Shuten Order, which in turn is the city/nation/religious group within which the game takes place. The protagonist wakes up in a hotel room with no memories and is swiftly greeted by two individuals who call themselves angels, explaining that the protagonist, who will go by the name Rei Shimobe (the game uses English name order in the English translation), is, in fact, the resurrected Founder—and must undergo “God’s Trial” to find her murderer, extract a confession, and then kill them herself within a few days. The suspects are the ministers who head the five ministries that make up the government of Shuten, the most powerful people in the nation now that the Founder is deceased.
A somewhat slow introductory segment introduces Rei, the angels Himeru and Mikotoru, and all five ministers, as well as providing a display of a few of the various effects that Himeru and Mikotoru categorise under the name of the Power of God (these allow Rei to remotely control a robot with her mind and to explode a security guard’s head when he is about to apprehend her, among other effects). At last, the game arrives at its primary conceit: Using the Power of God to divine which minister murdered her, Rei must go and investigate her choice and attempt to gain irrefutable proof of their crime.
Mechanically, this choice is up to the player and it dictates which route through the game Rei will take. This is where the game first engages genre thematically: Each minister’s route takes the form of a different video game genre. (This is made clear in the game’s marketing: to get the whole story, you will play all five). Most of these—Kishiru Inugami/Ministry of Justice, Honoka Kokushikan/Ministry of Education, Teko Ion/Ministry of Science, and Yugen Ushitora/Ministry of Health—are fundamentally subgenres of the visual novel (VN), though the game’s insistence on the use of “adventure” obscures this (except in the case of the Ministry of Science, which is very clearly clearly an old-school multi-perspectival VN). Ministry of Security, centered on Manji Fushicho, is the exception, taking the form of a stealth action game, though even this pathway devotes large segments of its non-stealth-level gameplay to the visual novel mode that is the game’s base state. From the perspective of gameplay, each of the routes range from genuinely excellent examples of their genre—like Ministry of Science, which I think was executed nearly flawlessly, though could have had greater variety in its bad ends—to mediocre ones, like the aforementioned Ministry of Security, in which the stealth was a bit clunky and repetitive.
Narratively, however—and both Science and Security are narratively very strong routes—the genre play does much more. Each route integrates the features of its genre into the narrative it is telling. They do so through the use of the Power of God Revelation, which allows Rei to, according to the angels, “see things as they really are.” Ministry of Security serves, in spite of the mild tediousness of the stealth gameplay itself, as probably the most striking example of how this allows the narrative of the route to interface with the conventions of video game genre.
Throughout Ministry of Security, Rei investigates Manji’s relationship to the Founder, her knowledge of the Founder’s murder, and her background, while simultaneously accompanying her as she investigates the recent reappearance of the terrifying mascot-costumed serial murder Nephilim. Each stealth section occurs as Rei attempts to escape Nephilim in a new location, presented with top-down isometric graphics, and filled with bits of narrative in the form of scattered objects and documents, as well as Rei’s thoughts and dialogue. The power of Revelation allows Rei to perceive the world from the perspective the player does, to see herself running and to see Nephilim while there are still walls between them, thus facilitating her escape. At the most immediate level, this reminds the player that what is possible in a game is shaped by the conventions and technical possibilities of its mode of presentation: not only would Rei be unable to restart the stealth section when the player allows her to be caught were this not actually a video game; her diegetic perception of the chase matching the form of this mode of gameplay is literally what allows her to escape Nephilim at all. Running through the maze-like locations in which she encounters the killer only leads Rei to survival or knowledge because of the conventions of top-down isometric stealth action games which allow the player to know the positions of opponents who cannot see them until they enter into direct line of sight. Likewise, the scattering of plot-and-lore relevant documents and tools throughout locations like abandoned malls and disused factories is found only in video games.
The artifice of these conventions is not presented as a problem with the genre, merely the conditions of its meaningfulness. And, as each route is followed, the knowledge Rei gains is similarly shaped by her conscious participation in the genres that each route enacts. We the players know we are always playing a mystery thriller, but within this particular thriller we are also playing all these other game-forms—and what we can learn in and about the larger mystery is altered by which of them are available to Rei at any given time: the documents of Security, the factoids presented by non-datable characters in Education, the evidence of Justice, and so on. Genre, understood broadly as an ever-malleable set of conventions and expectations which allow for recognition of a story as a type of thing, becomes here the basic condition of progress through the larger narrative of the game—and, as Rei learns about the murderer, herself, and Shuten, of narrative and knowledge more broadly.
This centrality of genre as a meaning-making technique, literalized and emblematized through the individual routes, also serves as the condition for the game’s exploration of gender. From the get-go, the question of gender ambiguity is central to moving the plot along. Rei is told she is the resurrected Founder and immediately accepts Himeru’s assignment of her as a woman, though she presents in a distinctly androgynous manner throughout the game. It rapidly becomes clear that almost everyone in Shuten believes the Founder to be a man, yet it also rapidly becomes clear that if Rei ever removes her (very fashionable) mask she would be immediately recognized as the Founder. Already there is something interestingly queer happening—Rei is decidedly gender-non-conforming, though appears to be content to identify herself as a cis woman, but the Founder was (at least publicly) presenting as a man. More interesting, though, is the interface between gender and genre. Throughout the game, Rei repeatedly finds herself being misidentified as a man in both casual and more serious ways.
The major exception to this is in Ministry of Health, where partway through there is a round of introductions and she proactively informs the others that she is a woman. In many of the more pervasive assumptions, she is pressed into masculine narrative roles appropriate to the genre in which she finds herself. Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Education are the most important of these, though Ministry of Justice also introduces the main caveat to my analysis of gender’s centrality. Japanese enacts gender in language differently from English, so, while there are many explicit instances of gender ambiguity, there are also places where the English adds gender information. In Ministry of Justice, for example, the route’s additional characters frequently address Rei as “Mr. Detective,” in lines that are voiced in Japanese with the gender-neutral honorific “-san.” However, the gendered role of heroic male detective is still reflected in the Japanese-language game through Rei’s relationship with the pretty maid, who fills the role of the obvious scapegoat suspect who swoons over Rei and refers to her with terms like “my prince.”
The Ministry of Education, essentially a dating simulator, shows this even more dramatically. In this route, through the machinations of the Minister of Education Honoka Kokushikan, Rei is dragooned into playing the role of the new boy at school in a late-high-school themed romance plot contrived and enacted by Honoka (who tells Rei she will herself be present in the school in disguise). While Rei is decidedly displeased with the hoops she is forced to jump through in order to continue her investigation of Honoka, and with the deadly stakes of her participation in this contrivance, she is distinctly unbothered by needing to play the role of the boy in a heterosexual romance. At the same time, though, she is not interested in using this role to rethink her relationship to gender (or to sexuality, in spite of the fact that she is clearly much more attracted to the women who express interest in her than in the one man who does so in another route). She remains securely situated in her (queer) position as a gender-non-conforming woman who happens to play a masculine role when the genres into which her life is falling demands. The genre conventions of the dating simulator of course also contribute to this—Rei, as “the boy,” is expected to take the active role in asking the girl(s) to date her, which she does, using the power of Revelation to track how far along she is in the “seduction” (the word used not only by the game and by Rei but by Honoka in setting this plot up within the route).
The essential role Revelation plays in allowing Rei to navigate each of these genres also brings the game to its reflections on the abilities it calls the Power of God. While many of the details about this power and its significance would require giving away many of the game’s mysteries, the questions are raised soon after beginning. Very early on, it becomes clear that Shuten Order is a religious group that prays for “the end” and that enemies of the Order within the city/nation are “heretics.” “The Doctrine” seems to be essentially the same as the law of the land. Faith and the Founder’s personal charisma seem to control almost every aspect of this peaceful society/doomsday cult, though life in Shuten appears to be legitimately pleasant and no less free than life in any system of laws, in spite of the obvious cult parallels.
And yet, equally early, we learn that the Power of God is forbidden and, in fact, that the adherents of the Shuten Order seem quite hostile to “God.” This tension—between the constant positioning of Shuten as religious and the persistent resistance to “God” in spite of living in a world in which the Power of God is provably real—makes up much of the thematics of the close of the game, after all five ministers have been investigated. Although it is only at this point that the exact nature of the Power of God and of the relationship between Shuten Order and the God they do not worship becomes clear, those details reverberate backwards through the game. All the little weirdnesses and discomforts and doubts that accumulated throughout the five main routes are joined to one another in a conclusion that effectively answers the world-questions and opens up space for serious theological and thematic reflection on what it means to relate to “God” and to live religiously without framing that practice around “worship.”
Ultimately, Shuten Order is a thoughtful exploration of the many ways in which meanings are made at both the individual and social levels through its depiction of these three major thematic pillars. While the game is far from flawless—it is occasionally awkwardly paced, sometimes repetitive, a bit too fond of flashbacks, and has gameplay that is, from time to time, more narratively engaged than mechanically successful—the core is excellent. The central characters are well drawn and emotionally rich, the ideas are approached intentionally and have lots of opportunities for depth, and the final solution to the overall mystery was satisfying, solvable, and appropriately foreshadowed. The dialogue was convincing and engaging, although there is a somewhat uneven (though much improved from its original release) translation from Japanese. The comic-book visual design is beautiful and resonates well with the tone of the game (and variations on it are well used to help visually separate each genre explored) and the soundtrack is atmospheric and well-scored. And most crucially, the speculative and mystery elements are well-integrated with one another, allowing the science fictional setting to play a core part in both the thinking and the plot of the game. Even with some hiccups, I recommend Shuten Order for fans of mystery and of VNs, especially fans of games like the Danganronpa series (2010-) and Master Detective Archives: Rain Code (2024).