Yet Another Killing Game (YAKG) is, well, yet another killing game, and one of many inspired by Ace Attorney, Zero Escape, and Danganronpa, but, compared to its contemporaries, it has an X factor and higher level of polish that make it stand out.

Beginning YAKG, the nameable main character awakes next to two young women in the foyer of a moderately-sized western house. They explain the situation: the front door (and all other possible exits) is locked, and has written on it a message that it will not open until one person inside the house dies. From there, the trio investigates the accessible rooms of the house to see if there is a way for them to avoid the worst-case scenario.

YAKG turns out to be the rare kind of story whose best part is its middle. During its first act, I thought it seemed quite generic: a competently produced visual novel, sure, but story-wise, it lacked anything that set it apart from other death games. Moving on to the second act, though, the scope of the story expands into something more mysterious and more unique—none of its pieces individually are new, but the combination of them is something slightly different, and something YAKG pulls off well.

On the other hand, the final act of the story goes a bit off the deep end, in my opinion, and almost goes too far in trying to set itself apart from other death games. A smorgasbord of new story elements are introduced, and many of them seem like deus ex machina whose inclusion was forced in order to direct the story to a specific conclusion. At least, I can give YAKG a bit of credit here—the story did not go in the direction I thought it would (I thought the main character would be the daughter that had "died" in the house), but more so because its conclusion felt unsupported by a lack of proper build-up, rather than deliberate red herrings leading my theorizing astray.

[Side note: this visual novel would have really benefited from a built-in flowchart or at least a developer-approved guide on its Steam and Itch pages; I don't know if I would have been able to find the true end without the help of some discussion posts on Steam, and in the gallery, I'm still missing about 20% of the CGs, which I would have liked to see.]

Overall, while I thought YAKG evolved from a generic death game premise into something of its own, that evolution went a bit too far in its final act. However, Yet Another Killing Game establishes Jun Kakeru as a western VN developer to look out for, and I can't wait to see what they do next.

6/10