Death Note Deserves Better Games

Announced on October 30, Death Note: Killer Within is a social deduction game which pits Light Yagami (a.k.a. Kira), and his equally demented Kira Followers, against (Interpol Detective) L and a squad of investigators in a classic battle of the wits. Here’s a quick description to save you a click. Stop me when you’ve heard this one before.

Killer Within is game of two phases. The Action Phase sees players gather clues and complete tasks as they move through the overworld. The Meeting Phase brings everyone together to discuss their findings and establish suspects. The game can end in a few ways. Team Kira will win if L is eliminated. Team L will win if Kira is arrested. Alternatively, whichever team fills up the Progress gauge (tied to the aforementioned tasks) will take home the victory.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this—Death Note makes for an admittedly compelling setting for such a game—but don’t you feel like you’ve already played this by now? Overlooking the obvious examples, there was already a version of this game done on Nintendo DS back in 2007.

Death Note: Kira Game never received a U.S. release, but there’s plenty of footage of it on YouTube, and fans translated the whole game to English years ago. Now, it goes without saying, but Killer Within is a dramatic step up in quality from a mid-2000s text-based handheld game. I personally don’t care for the toddler toy shaped-character models or their hauntingly empty eyes, but there is a novelty to the game’s inoffensive aesthetic compared to the grim, grisly nature of the manga and anime.

We haven’t seen much gameplay, but the quick glimpses in the reveal trailer look like a refined version of what Konami was going for all those years ago. Is it an improvement? Absolutely. Is it interesting? Not really, and that’s a major letdown for something as cool as cool and powerful as the Death Note.

However, maybe that’s unfair. Perhaps Fisher-Price Death Note will surprise me and be the game of my dreams. It’s free via PlayStation Plus (as part of November’s PS Plus lineup), so I’ll certainly give it an honest shot, but from the outside looking in, I can’t help but feel like we’ve already walked this path, and that the game is doomed from the start.

Anime adaptation video games have been stuck in a box for a long time. Fighting shows get the Ultimate Ninja Storm wrapping. More complex fantasy shows get the .HACK treatment. Everything else is consigned to the dark depths of mobile game genericism—uninspired Puzzle games, worn out Gacha systems, and the general death of all creativity.

Sure, it feels awesome to jump into a brawler filled with your favorite Jujutsu Kaisen characters, but when every single franchise starts to feel the same, what’s left to do? Killer Within is a step out of those particular confines, but only by the thinnest of margins, which is a bit ridiculous for such a high-quality franchise. Death Note is a transcendental story. It stands the test of time as one of fiction’s best mysteries, thrillers, and psychological horrors ever. Just look at the sales numbers. The manga has received a barrage of adaptations and cultivated a legacy as strong as near any piece of popular fiction in the last twenty years. So, why have we not cracked the code on a proper videogame adaptation?

The easy answer lies in the story’s core identity. Death Note is super cerebral. Maybe there’s no way to make a compelling game when 90% of the drama takes place in the brain of deranged criminal (and the genius-level investigator who is chasing him.) Perhaps there’s no way to make an interesting game primarily about constructing a flawless string of murders. Especially not one that would require you to switch to the POV of various citizens of the most populous metropolitan area in the world. In fact, I can’t think of a single successful game that manages to balance methodical, slice-of-life concepts with anything bizarre at all. Maybe it is all too much. Too bad there’s no established formula for interesting choice-based games in the horror-thriller genre either.

Look, none of this is to say Killer Within won’t be fun. I still think you should give it a shot. I’m simply disappointed anime fans rarely get to dream big. Just like Death Note, other proven properties struggle to get a shred of original content. We’ve gone nearly 20 years without a Cowboy Bebop game. Doesn’t that feel criminal? I don’t want to wear a Faye Valentine skin in Overwatch 2, I want to be Faye Valentine and get up to hijinks on the Bebop. In that way, Death Note: Killer Within feels equally lame.

This is still a step in the right direction, given the entire game could have been an Among Us crossover, but the industry’s internal compass is way off. It’s a long way back to the trail, too. At this rate, we’ll never get that Dr. Stone open-world survival game of my dreams, and who wants to live in a world without that?