Danganronpa takes the locked-room murder mystery, fills the room with gifted teenagers, and hands the microphone to a robot bear who thinks the whole thing is hilarious. Monokuma is the best worst host in games.
Structurally it's two games glued together. First you wander the school gathering evidence and getting attached to people. Then the class trial starts, and you fire arguments at your friends' contradictions until someone is convicted and executed. The tonal whiplash between pastel anime aesthetics and what actually happens is entirely intentional.
The writing survives because the cast refuses to be archetypes for long. Everyone arrives labelled — Ultimate Detective, Ultimate Gambler, Ultimate Lucky Student — and the game spends its runtime dismantling those labels, usually right before it takes the character away from you.
Nagito Komaeda deserves special mention as one of the most genuinely unnerving characters the series produced, largely because he's so polite about it.
This collection pulls from that world: characters, symbols, and the pink blood the series uses instead of red. Install one and let your pointer carry a little despair, hopefully the fictional kind.
