Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc hits Steam this week.

Imagine a giant game of Clue where 15 high school students are locked inside an academy and told that only one of them can leave. And that is, by killing one of their other classmates… then successfully avoiding being caught at it in a trial.

If you’re caught, you are sentenced to a torturous death. If you’re NOT caught, however, you go free.. and everyone else is killed.

Pretty gruesome, huh? Yeah. No prizes in guessing where THIS game comes from. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc hits Steam this week, and plays like a faster paced Ace Attorney slash (or is that slash-ER? game of Clue). You need to interface with your other students, and gather information. When one of the students is found dead, the game moves into the “Class Trial” portion, where you must use the evidence gathered to find weak points in other people’s story, and through various sub-games, deduce what actually happened, and who the real killer is. Get it all right, and you move on. Get it wrong.. well. let’s not get it wrong, shall we?

The game has a very psychological feel to it, and you will be looking to remember evidence you had before as you almost build a psychological puzzle on your fellow class mates.. This is not the kind of game you can speed run, nor would you want to, I think. You will grow to know your fellow classmates, understand them, and even feel sorry for them, despite the fact that they murdered someone else in a futile attempt to earn their own freedeom.

I don’t want to get into the characterizations of the characters, because that’s something that you need to find out on your own. There’s a couple of submodes so you can try some other things when you’ve completed the main story (it’s very linear). But there’s one character I want to bring up. And that’s the leader of the trials, a talking bear.

Yes. A talking teddy bear. That’s easily the most creepy of all the characters in the story, except one (which I would detail, but again, I don’t want to spoil you.) and it’s this bastard.

There’s a saying that some games aren’t your cup of tea, but are probably someone else’s double vodka, straight. That applies here. I actually watched the Japanese Animated show based on this at the recommendation of a friend of mine. I’m not sure I still consider him a friend as a result. It’s.. very twisted mentally in places. It goes to some very disturbing places, if you ask me.

But a ton of fans here in the US played it on modded systems with a fan translation, and it deserves a bigger audience. Not me, mind you. But people who will enjoy psychological mind-screws and very tight game play will LOVE this game