It's oozing with style from nearly every corner and is very inspired in its goals to get the player to think critically on both investigating crimes and coming up with their verdicts. The game is at its best when it commits to this, and there's clear attention to complications in morality and truth in the narrative. This sets it apart from other recent games that similarly test your ability to unravel truth from incomplete facts (i.e. Return of the Obra Dinn, Heaven's Vault).

However, it's got a slog of a rising action. Part of this is due to an overreliance on overly simple collectathon-esque gameplay. It's also an open world game that never gives you very fun upgrades. There's a lot of redundancy as you're basically supposed to travel back and forth the island over and over with diminishing returns that can make things far less exciting. At the end of the day, I can see a good argument for why it's just not worth it to go through all of this.

Would love to see where this goes next (both the genre and the developer).

Katana Zero's story is the first I've seen begin to treat psychopathy as the mental disability it is, not just something to gawk at. It does do this through an ultraviolent action game with familiar story beats, but it puts unprecedented emphasis on the very real impairments and vulnerabilities its protagonist faces. This is the first act of a larger narrative (of which Justin Stander has confirmed at least two more acts for), so it's impossible to say if it'll buckle under the weight of such a delicate issue as things get more complicated. All I can say is it feels like it yearns for the same desire for genuine rehabilitation I do.

As a whole, this is a very lovingly crafted game.

It's made for cracking edgy jokes with people at get-togethers, and there are far easier ways to achieve that if you're not picky. You can also play it alone solely for finding all the different outcomes the game has written (there are over a thousand!), which could be entertaining.

As a game, I feel like it's just not that attention-keeping. There are no character developments or complications to be invested in. No incentive to compete with the other players other than just wanting to screw with them; and even then, there's not even an interesting domino effect for the absurdly simple prompts you have as competition. I feel like there's pretty much no thought to seriously put into the scenarios. Everything feels like its detached from any kind of progression in gameplay or narrative. I don't feel particularly accomplished or satisfied when finishing a run.

And the edginess really wore me down. For a game that relies so heavily on you wanting to pine for the characters, they feel so unlikeable (but of course my silly heart pines for them anyway). It rots with so much tongue-in-cheek cynicism without being exciting enough to get me to be a part of that.

I have no doubt many friend groups have enjoyed and will enjoy spending game nights on this. I'm clearly not included in this game's target audience, however much I wish I were.