Rain Code - A New Danganronpa?! Review on Linux and Steam Deck

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Rain Code is a recently released game on PC after a first incursion on Switch. It’s a Japanese game published by Spike Chunsoft, who is well known for its great library of visual novels, including the famous Danganronpa. I have already covered Danganronpa twice before (First and Second one)- as they happened to have Linux ports made by Abstraction Games. And they were excellent games, too, which does not hurt.

Why mention Danganronpa so much as part of my introduction? There is a very good reason for that. In many ways, Rain Code is just another take at making a Danganronpa game without the branding, and without the Monokuma character. But all the elements are there.

Background

You start the game with a prologue, which acts as an introduction to the world and the gameplay elements. You are a young (teenager?) boy called Yuma Kokohead. You are of small stature, and you belong to an international league of detectives, the WDO (World Detective Organization) as a trainee.

The WDO aims at unveiling all mysteries around the world. And this time, they have decided to send you to Kanai city, a place that’s facing political troubles for the past few years. It has somehow turned into some kind of corporate dictatorship, with a single company called Amaterasu being more or less in control of everything, and turning more and more fascist by the day at the hands of the “Peacekeepers”, the private police of Amaterasu. In this context, your role is to find what is the ultimate secret of that city. Why is it raining constantly? What is Amaterasu actually doing? And what is the life of people in Kanai like?

As you start the game, your young hero has been knocked out at the train station where you were supposed to board the train, and does not remember much about himself anymore. Temporary amnesia? Sounds familiar? Yes, this trope has been used about 300 millions times in video games by now, it’s a complete cliche and it’s sad to see writers resorting to this again and again. But… it will actually be properly explained later on in the game, so do not make a hasty judgment at this point.

After being knocked out, you find yourself able to hear and see a Shinigami (a deity of death in the Japanese culture) that takes the shape of a small fat bluish floating ghost. Only you can see and interact with it. Turns out it will soon become a critical advantage to have it around when you face new challenges and mysteries.

As you enter the train just on time, you find yourself in good company: the only passengers of the train are other detectives from the WDO - all sent to achieve the same goal at the destination. But things are soon going to take a turn for the worse in this very train, as someone will wipe out the WDO staff in a matter of minutes. Your first crime scene leads to your first investigation.

Danganronpa Reinvented?

Just like in Danganronpa, you have to find out the culprits in every new crime story. Everything begins with some kind of setup / introduction to each case, until you are faced with the crime itself and put under pressure to solve the case.

You then enter a phase of investigation, where you walk around and check items, people, bodies, in order to collect clues - using the typical point and click mechanics.

Solution Keys are unlocked as you investigate (just like truth bullets in Danganronpa), and when you have collected all the clues possible, the game tells you that your investigation is over.

You are sent soon after into a Mystery Labyrinth by the Shinigami, a parallel world where truths and lies take physical form.

In that world, you will be able to test your reasoning by choosing your path through different doors, answering quizzes and playing a few other mini-games to ultimately find out who was the true culprit for the present crime. In Danganronpa this was done in the trial scenes. This time, there is more moving around involved, and more action, but that’s still close enough.

Remember the other detectives from the WDO that show up in the story? Well, they are not normal human beings. They all have a Forte, which is a special ability that makes them capable of doing something very useful to conduct their investigations. One character, for example, is able to see how the crime scene was when the dead person’s body was first discovered. This is reminiscent of Danganronpa once again where the super students admitted to the academy also had special, super-human abilities.

Even the music composer who worked on Danganronpa is back in this title, and every single piece of music sounds like exactly like something out of Danganronpa. I guess the main difference is the helper character. In Danganronpa this was Monokuma, a vicious stuffed-toy with nefarious intentions. Here, Shinigami is more of an ally supporting you in your quest, and commenting on everything that’s happening. The commenting part is priceless, some of its lines are hilarious.

World Building

So as you can now picture, there is very little innovation per se in the game system in itself. But everything is much better looking than in Danganronpa now. The whole game is now fully in 3D, including the characters, which is a first - in Danganronpa all characters were flat, cardboard type sprites in 3D environments. Since they made the move to 3D, all characters have many more animations as they have to move around, talk, express themselves in different ways. It’s still fairly static during the dialog scenes (characters are in one spot and just moving their heads a little) which feels like 2000 tech in RPGs, but most of the dialogs are fully voiced. And the voice acting (in Japanese at least, I did not try it with any other soundtrack) is VERY, very good. Professional voice actors are unmatched in Japan for this kind of thing.

Graphics-wise, beyond the characters, the game is a huge upgrade. You are now moving in very well designed environments, with good textures and a good sense of architecture. The city is submerged by rainy weather so it mostly looks like night the whole time, with neon lights and reflections on the wet floor being your guides.

The story is composed of fairly independent chapters. The serve two purposes:

1 - to give you a specific crime to solve

2 - to tell you more and more about Kanai city and give you a few more cues about what is going on

In the great tradition of Danganronpa and other visual novels-like games such as the Ace Attorney series, absolutely no crime is obvious from the get go. You won’t easily guess who did it, or even how they actually did it. The whole investigation is just there to give you some more time to think, and then the Mystery Labyrinth is designed to bring you towards the resolution step by step, by asking the right questions and making you use the clues accordingly. Once you solve a crime, you have to put back all the pieces of the story together in a deduction phase, once again like in Danganronpa.

As expected, the whole script is tailored at the millimeter for maximum surprises and sudden revelations. I have just finished the game (there are 5 chapters) and once you start it’s hard to put the game down. However, some of the murders you deal with feel like they were designed for completely other games (Chapter 1 and 2 very much so) and were patch-worked to fit into Rain Code at some point. It still somehow works, but I can’t shake the feeling that Rain Code acts as a shell for a number of short stories rather than a cohesive game. To give you a concrete example without spoilers, the second chapter is about investigating a crime that occured inside a girls’ high school, during a play. It feels completely out of place.

I used to complain that Danganronpa was fairly verbose, and I could say the same thing about Rain Code, but it’s somewhat better in that regard. Still way too long when it comes to conversations, and too much neverending fluff, but it’s slightly more tolerable and I have seen games that are MUCH worse in that regard (looking at you, Stein’s Gate…).

Characters

To make the story believable you need strong characters, and Rain Code has a large cast. You get a bunch of characters that make it throughout the whole story, and specific characters that are only encountered in each chapter. The protagonist, Yuma, is naive enough to be likable by most players. He does wear an absolutely awful hat, lol (that I usually refer to as crepe hat).

The supporting NPCs are a bunch of teenagers (as expected in most visual novels, which tells you a lot about the expected audience of the game) and the evil adversaries are usually young or middle-aged adults. This is almost a language for visual novels these days, so the game does not break stereotypes.

The game features visible enemies who are part of the Peacekeepers corps, and have paper-thin backgrounds and personalities. They just appear evil and don’t seem to have any motive whatsoever apart from controlling people and abusing their power. This is a downgrade vs Danganronpa, where the criminals were typical people among us, and turned to crime because of ulterior motives and circumstances. The ambiguity still exists when looking for culprits in each chapter, but the other baddies are clearly labeled.

Among the NPCs you get the usual cliches of Japanese games: a beautiful girl who’s also a airhead, a lazy guy who spends all of his time reading, an egomaniac boy who keeps chasing girls, and so on… it’s not very original. For the most part, the cast feels a bit weak and predictable and betrays a very simplistic view of characters’ relationships. After playing Paranormasight a few months back, this feels like a let down, but to be fair Rain Code is made for a younger public, so the expectations are clearly different.

Still, the best part is undoubtedly your everlasting companion, Shinigami, who keeps commenting on every thing that’s happening. While it appears as a floating ghost, it will transform into a busty woman dressed in sexy black clothes whenever you go to the Mystery Labyrinth. Once you end up in there, she becomes an active adviser to help you solve the crime, and speaks with a foul mouth which is an hilarious contrast with the protagonist Yuma who errs on the polite side.

Useless RPG and Open World Elements

The city is divided in several areas, and you can move freely in each of them (they are progressively unlocked after each chapter). There is an open-world aspect to the game, with some loading screens between areas that you can visit at any time. While you have a main storyline and campaign, there are a few sub-quests where people ask for your help. There’s not really any point in doing those, unless you are a completionist.

You get a mini-map on your HUD to show you where you should go to follow up on your current quest items. You sometimes can get lost because the point you need to reach is either on an upper floor or a lower floor, and it’s not always clear on how to get there.

You also get detective points by clicking on random stuff in the world, and experience when you resolve a crime or a sub-quest. These points make it possible for you to unlock a skill tree. These skills are simply bonuses that make the mini-games easier to solve once you get in the Mystery Labyrinth.

For example, one less solution key to deal with when trying to find the right way to counter an argument. Or slowing down the speed of the mini-games to give you more time to think, and so on. Absolutely none of them are needed to finish the game. You can blissfully ignore the whole thing and go on with your business. The game is easy enough as is. This may be another sign that this is a Dangaronpa light title, aimed at younger kids, for which the mini-games may prove a little challening.

A Worthy Story

At the end of the day, I had a good time. The whole game takes about 30 hours to finish, and there is no game-over. In case you fail somewhere, you can always come back to the last checkpoint and overcome the mini-game you failed, for example.

The story up to the end was solid, while it felt more and more predictable as you were reaching the final chapter. The final big reveal could be seen from a mile away - this made the final chapter a little tedious since I had a good picture of what actually happened in Kanai city, but had to wait for the game to lead me there sluggishly.

If I have to compare, I’ll say it: Danganronpa (both the first and second episodes) is definitely of a better level when it comes to the storyline and the quality of the mysteries, with some of the crime-solving reaching absolute heights in the genre. Rain Code never gets there, while it brings some cool tricks on the table and benefits from a much nicer presentation and a cool side-kick with the Shinigami character.

I pondered about this fact. Why is Rain Code somewhat less exciting than Danganronpa despite sharing so many similarities? The key difference is that you don’t feel involved with all of the crimes you investigate. Most of them concern people with whom you have no prior relationship. They are just bodies you find and your only reason to deal with the crime is because you are part of the WDO, not because you really care in the first place. The genius of Danganronpa was to have a fairly long introduction phase where you spent time with your classmates and started bonding with each of them until the killing started. This is definitely missing here, and it makes for a weaker and less connected storyline, which is basically pushed to you via external events only.

Since the game is aimed at a younger demographic, it may be a good introduction to the genre, with a lot less graphic violence than Danganronpa.

As the game ended, it hinted at a potential sequel, so we may see more of Yuma Kokohead later on.

Why not a New Danganronpa?

In a way, Spike Chunsoft has taken an unusual approach this time around. Instead of making YET another Danganronpa episode, which would surely have sold well as well, they have decided to make a brand new world with brand new characters while keeping somewhat similar mechanics. Any other company like EA or Ubi Soft would never have taken that road.

While I think the result is inferior in some aspects, this is a great initiative. It forces the company and the devs to experiment and take risks - but only measured risks. The core gameplay was already tried and proved with the Danganronpa series, and there was no reason for them to make something completely new while staying in the investigation genre. Instead, they focused on creating a new cast of characters, a new world, and also a new tech approach by moving away from a 2D-heavy production.

Another aspect is developer motivation. If I were a dev and I was told “hey, you have to work on the new Danganronpa episode”, I would maybe feel “here we go again…”. A new franchise means you get to try your hands on something that’s a blank sheet of paper and you definitely have more freedom to put your mark in it.

Will this bet prove to be the right move? This is the only good question. I hope that the game will sell well and make a point in the process. I’m not sure if the title of the game was a good pick. At first, just by hearing the name, I had no idea what Rain Code was about. Name recognition is a huge deal and takes care of half of your marketing effort.

So if you get this game and like it enough, consider doing your part to spread the word. Not for Spike Chunsoft, but to encourage the development of new games that are not just sequels or prequels or reboots. The last Tokyo Games Show (end 2024) was a stark reminder that innovation is almost at a halt now in Japan with every big publisher just taking easy bets. It’s getting depressing.

Steam Deck

The game plays very well on the Steam Deck. It’s a little demanding for the device - it runs on Unreal Engine and some of the scenes are fairly complex in nature, so you need to keep it running at least at 8 or 9W (GPU power) in order to sustain a framerate between 30 and 40 FPS. Of course, you could go crazy and go with the default 15W, but since this is a game that will take long stretches of time to progress, you will want to maximize your battery life where possible. In terms of controls, it plays perfectly as is, and the text is always easy to read. It has a verified status, and in this case it’s fully deserved.

Resources

Some additional links for you:

We have received a key from the publisher to review this game.