It was recently announced that Shuten Order, a multi-genre murder mystery game, would be released on September 5, 2025, as a collaborative title between Too Kyo Games and DMM Games. In an interview with Famitsu, Shuten Order’s directors Kazutaka Kodaka and Nakazawa Takumi, alongside producer Junta Inagaki discussed the various difficulties they faced when creating the “religion” Shuten Order’s story revolves around. Apparently, even the writers kept forgetting its intricate rules, and they also had to pay close attention not to cross any lines when it came to depicting the fictional religion.
Shuten Order is a new project headed by Danganronpa and Hundred Line creator Kazutaka Kodaka, and unsurprisingly, it brings a very Kodaka-esque twist to the murder mystery adventure genre. The game is set in a fictional country led by a religious cult advocating for the end of humanity, and the story begins with the murder of the cult leader. The said cult leader, who is also the main character of the game, gets reincarnated as a gender-ambiguous amnesiac hero and is tasked with finding out who their killer is. There are five suspects and five routes the story can branch in – and with each route, the genre and the gameplay completely change. On top of the genre-bending gameplay, the developers paid close attention to the worldbuilding – especially when it came to making the religion of the Shuten Order “make sense” in the context of a murder mystery.
“The conventions of the Shuten religion, or to put it more clearly – the rules its followers must abide by – were really difficult to create from scratch. For example, we would be faced with the problem of Why was there a murder in the Shuten Order in the first place, if the religion forbids bloodshed? As there are also many rules regarding how tricks behind murders are set up, the base rules of the religion were made at the same time as the outline of the plot. Then I had the scenario writers for each of the routes come up with ideas that would further reinforce those base rules,” Kodaka says.
“The basic ideas behind the Shuten religion were pretty much established since the beginning, but when we were coming up with the murder tricks, it was necessary for us to also emphasize its cultish vibes,” Nakazawa adds. He also explained that whenever they needed “an excuse for something to happen in the game,” they’d just find the idea that works the best and add it to the basic framework of the story. So, for example, an easy way to make the religion look more cultish would be to add a part about human sacrifice into the story.
Despite getting a lot of creative freedom, the scenario writers struggled quite a bit with the worldbuilding and the rules of the Shuten religion. Because of them being so nuanced, the writers often ended up forgetting the basic rules and breaking the consistency of the story, Nakazawa says. “The error we made most often was making characters engage in violence. In other titles, a lot of the time there were scenes where the conflict could be settled with violence. However, we had to think of other ways of settling conflicts in Shuten Order.”
As he explains, the reason for these errors was because the Shuten Order is an organization of pacifists. The idea of the Shuten Order being a sect that ”yearns for the end of humanity” led the writers to jump to the conclusion that they are a dangerous bunch – when in fact, according Nakazawa, most of the devotees of the sect are “too mild.” Rather than trying to cause the end of humanity, they silently “wait for it.” And as a commune that forbids any kind of violence, this precisely makes it a lot more difficult to create murder motives, or write violent bits into the story.
Moreover, due to religion and cults being a very delicate topic, especially in Japan, the team had difficulties with creating a game about religion that wouldn’t reference any actual religions or religious organizations. “The thing we were most concerned about was depicting the religious elements in the game. If it were a story that even slightly infringed on any already existing religion, I assume this collaboration (Between DMM and Too Kyo Games) wouldn’t have happened.” However, the team assures fans that the religious elements in the game are all completely original.
Shuten Order is scheduled to launch on September 5 for the PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch.
