Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table (henceforth DG) is far from the first time there's been a story about death games as a perverse form of entertainment for a shadowy group of elites who bankroll them. In fact, that's a major element of Squid Game, arguably the single most well-known death game story out there, in general. But while other death game stories have made use of this idea, and its natural extension that there can be multiple death games, DG is the first time I've seen it taken to an extreme—not only do multiple death games happen, but several happen, regularly, because it's an entire industry. An industry that's well funded enough, no less, that some bold people who would've done great on Jackass! under different circumstances can just keep on playing game after game to, well, put food on the table.

This first volume of DG in particular has our protagonist, an experienced player who wants to clear 99 games named Yuki, involved in two such death games: the first, something akin to an escape room in which Yuki is surrounded almost entirely by girls who are completely new to death games. The second, a flashback to one in which a less-seasoned Yuki and several other—largely experienced—players were bunnies trying to avoid getting killed by a team of mostly inexperienced players who were playing the role of hunters.

Yuki's not only the main character, but also the only character present in both death games in this volume. So it's hard to get a feel for the general character writing outside of Yuki. Still, Yuki herself seems interesting enough as a protagonist. Far from being the Darumi from The Hundred Line type, she doesn't approach death games with the kind of bloodthirsty zeal you might expect from a serial death game participant—rather, she's a coolheaded strategist. And while she wants as many people to survive as possible, she recognizes that sacrifices of varying degrees are going to be necessary. She's made rules and traditions for herself to avoid feeling overwhelmed, either by guilt or stress. To her, death games are treated not unlike a job, which, in a way, they are for her. Sort of.

Despite what the title might make you think, Yuki's not so much playing the death games because she has to to eke out a living—although that's part of it—but more so because she has a goal to survive 99 games. More specifically, it's not made clear in this volume whether or not putting food on the table was the original reason she started entering so many death games, but the backstory behind how she arrived at her goal of wanting to survive 99 is the latter death game in this volume. A minor and forgivable case of expectations and reality not quite meeting in DG, but also, only the tip of the iceberg.

Let's just be honest with ourselves: when we indulge in death game stories, there's usually an expectation for gore. Death games are nothing if not a quintessential bloodsport. It doesn't always have to be the buckets of blood that stories like Saw or Danganronpa bring to the table, but there's a general expectation that odds are, we're going to see at least one person get brutally injured. Well, not so in DG! In the universe of DG, bodies of players are filled with some cocktail of chemical agents that allows for blood to turn into fluff when it meets the air, and any limbs that get lost are reattached after the game (assuming you survive to the end).

To be fair, if you're not good with gore, I can see this being a feature, and not a bug. But it also zaps some scenes of a lot of their gravity. We see it even in this volume: there's a psychological difference between seeing someone covered in fluff, and seeing someone covered in blood—both for the characters in the story, and the audience reading this. It just makes the whole thing feel way less serious than it's otherwise trying to be. Plus, there's something to be said about how it makes the stakes feel lower. Who cares that someone has to chop off their hand, for example, knowing that they're either going to die in the game or get it reattached as though nothing happened when they're out? It's way easier for Yuki, for example, to be okay with the idea of sacrificing a limb here and there, knowing that the consequences aren't going to last, and that there's not even so much as a grisly visual to remind her of what she's had to do. And as a reader, that just makes for a way less exciting death game.

If the lowered stakes didn't mute the tension enough as it is, the somewhat stilted writing throughout this volume does. For better or for worse, it has a very kinetic writing style that rarely allows the readers a moment to breathe or soak in what's going on. And even during those few and far between moments where it does, one can tell that action—rather than reaction—is much more so where author Yūshi Ukai's comfort zone is, and can make entire paragraphs come off as clunky. Such is the extent of this issue that it's hard to get a feel for the translation quality.

But even if it has a few notable stumbles, it's easy to see why DG won the Excellence Award at the 18th MF Bunko J Light Novel Newcomer Awards in 2022, and why it's getting an anime in 2026. The concept and story of DG are unique enough that, despite its shortcomings, this volume still has a lot of momentum that's bound to leave its audience dying to read on.