I'm far from an expert on this particular matter, but I'm not sure there's any game out there that's quite like Shuten Order. Created by Kazutaka Kodaka of Danganronpa and The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy fame, it is at its heart a visual novel, first and foremost devoted to delivering a narrative experience. However, each branch of the story operates within the framework of a different game genre before everything comes together in an Ace Attorney-style logical showdown.

Like many visual novels, it opens with a mystery. The amnesiac protagonist awakens in a hotel room, where she is confronted by two angels, Mikotoru and Himeru, who dub her Rei Shimobe. They tell her she, the Founder of the city of Shuten and the state religion of the Shuten Order, was murdered by one of her ministers, but in her final moments, she prayed to God for a second chance. She will be returned to life, but only if she passes God's trial: she must find the person who murdered and dismembered her to take back the stolen piece of her soul. However, she only has three days to do it.

From the get-go, Shuten Order is a visually striking game. Characters and environments alike are almost entirely hand-drawn, with bright, vivid colors. Rei's blue-and-red striped coat is especially bold and eye-catching. The characters are represented as cut-outs against their environments, drawing the eye to them. In Shuten, it's normal for people to wear masks as a fashion statement, as you would any accessory; even the background characters end up looking memorable. The characters and their world tell a story all on their own: what kind of place Shuten is and what kind of people inhabit it. This is further supported by the superstar voice cast, including the likes of Daisuke Ono and Aoi Yūki. Mitsuki Saiga deserves a special shoutout for her multifaceted performance as Rei, both in her “awkward baby bird” current state and as the poised, charismatic, androgynous Founder.

It is up to you, the player, to select which minister you think is the culprit, though the angels assure Rei that through the Power of God, she is certain to make the right choice. Each choice unlocks a different minister's route; each route is a different game genre. The Minister of Justice, Kishiru Inugami, is a drug addict embroiled in a serial murder mystery after reading the will of an old friend. The Minister of Health, Yugen Ushitora, finds himself kidnapped and forced into an escape room death game. The Minister of Science, Teko Ion, must direct Rei through his labyrinthine underground facility. The Minister of Education, Honoka Kokushikan, drugs Rei and forces her to romance her in a simulated school environment. Finally, the Minister of Security, Manji Fushicho, finds her department under attack from a costumed serial killer, the Nephilim.

Each route offers different bits and pieces about the world, Shuten, and who Rei was as the Founder; the order you play in will have a major effect on how you experience the game. However, you must play all five to reach the story's climax. This makes sense from an overall structural perspective – after all, each path offers a unique perspective with new information. However, this is also where you can most feel the strain of the game's scope. How do you get players to engage with a genre they're not used to playing? And how do you make sure all players get the necessary information in inherently nonlinear storytelling formats, such as dating sims? You have to tweak them to suit your purpose!

By far the strongest routes are Inugami's murder mystery and Fushicho's stealth action horror, which are fairly straightforward examples of their genres and well-suited to a linear story where every player should walk away with the same knowledge, if not the same experience. Inugami's mystery takes a bit too long to really get going, and since it was the first route I played, I was frustrated by the illusion of choice until the first murder. Kodaka cited making the stealth action gameplay in Fushicho's route simple enough for people who primarily play visual novels as one of the biggest design challenges of the game. It is, indeed, quite easy… but I, a person who almost exclusively plays visual novels and turn-based RPGs, still had to hand the controller off to my spouse, who enjoyed it quite a bit.

Kokushikan's dating sim presents its own challenges, since dating sims are heavily dependent on player choice. The answer here was simply not to really make it a dating sim. You don't get to choose which girl to pursue and when, and there's no stat-raising mechanics. The result is an engaging story, but I felt railroaded nonetheless. Nor is there any real challenge, since most of the choices are blindingly obvious, and I'm not even sure that it's possible to fail the story events.

Unfortunately, the last two routes I played were the worst ones: Ushitora's escape room and Teko Ion's “multi-perspective text adventure,” the latter of which isn't a storytelling format I've encountered much. “Escape room” is a bit of a misnomer, since the majority of Ushitora's route involves walking through featureless hallways, occasionally stopping to solve a sliding block, connect-the-dots, or Tetris block puzzle, until more plot happens. I wanted to cry – “escape room” is one of my favorite adventure game genres, and seeing it so poorly implemented was downright disheartening, even if the secondary characters I met were my favorites of the game.

Teko Ion's narrative suffered from having linearity imposed on it as well; it was, once again, usually obvious which was the correct choice, even telegraphed with a sound effect, with very few branches that took more than a minute or so to correct should you somehow end up going down the wrong way. Nor did I find the characters particularly likable, and the scenario – that making animals bigger and stronger would make them better suited to survive in a harsh environment – was outright ludicrous. However, it was hampered by an even bigger issue: a borderline incomprehensible translation courtesy of DICO Ltd., a death knell for a reading-based format like this. The translation is no great shakes for any part of the game, but here it's especially plagued with misused pronouns, sentence fragments, redundant language, clunky phrasing, typos – name an issue common to Japanese to English localizations, and it's there. The whole route was an agonizing slog through the worst web novel fan translation I could imagine, and these routes are not short. I also had to sit through Kappei Yamaguchi repeating his performance as Persona 4's Teddie, which further grated on me. At one point, I found myself muttering that if I had paid the US$50 MSRP for Shuten Order, I would want a refund.

Was it all worth it in the end, though? The overarching story of Shuten Order is, without reservations, fantastic. It's the exact kind of story I crave in adventure games with branching storylines, where once you've gone through all the routes and collected all the information, everything comes together in one grand picture, where suddenly everything makes sense. The game's final act brings loads of twists and turns of its own, including a pretty fun segment where the story walks you through some inductive reasoning. It's incredibly satisfying, and it did a lot to earn back my goodwill that had been sapped by hours of trudging through blank hallways and slogging through stilted prose. I can't expound on its thematic richness because that would involve spoiling several dramatic reveals, when theorizing about the nature of the Shuten Order is half the fun, so you'll just have to trust me that it's there.

In the end, it's hard to be sure whether or not I can recommend Shuten Order with my full chest. Two-thirds of it range from good to excellent… but in a 60-hour game, that still means around 20 hours of mediocre-to-bad gameplay. If the translation were better, I would feel more confident telling people to just push through. But the story is amazing, the characters are lovable, and perhaps most important, this is a story that is truly about something. If you do choose to pick it up, at least heed this warning: do not save Yugen Ushitora and Teko Ion's routes for last; better yet, don't play them in a row.