Shuten Order is a 2025 adventure-visual novel and multi-genre video game developed by Too Kyo Games and Neilo, and published by Spike Chunsoft and Exnoa. The story takes place within the city-state of Shuten, governed by the titular religious cult. The protagonist, Rei Shimobe, is a reincarnation of the cult's murdered Founder, revived without memories in a temporary body through the power of God. To permanently resurrect, Rei must clear God's Trial by identifying her murderer among the five ministers of Shuten's government. The game was originally released for Windows and Nintendo Switch on September 5, 2025, and an upgraded version for the Nintendo Switch 2 was released that November.
Shuten Order takes place over five routes, in which Rei investigates each of the ministers. Every route features a different style of gameplay, including point-and-click adventure, dating simulator, and stealth-based horror. A collaboration between Too Kyo and DMM Games (a subsidiary of Exnoa), the game was conceived by Too Kyo's Kazutaka Kodaka, directed by Takumi Nakazawa, and produced by DMM's Junta Inagaki. An omnibus-styled video game, it was designed to showcase the different styles of the adventure game genre. The art director was , who used vivid colors to create an eeriness against the story's religious themes. The soundtrack was composed by Masafumi Takada.
Upon release, Shuten Order received mixed reviews. Its critical reception and sales stalled due to its English localization, which contained several grammatical errors but was later improved in a patch. While some critics considered the various gameplay styles to be underdeveloped, the game was praised for its concept, story and characters, art direction, soundtrack, and voice cast led by Mitsuki Saiga as Rei.
Gameplay and setting
Premise and characters Shuten Order is an adventure and visual novel video game in which the player advances through text to progress the mystery, sci-fi, and dystopian story. The game takes place within the nation of Shuten, a theocratic city-state governed by the titular new religious movement and cult. The cult firmly opposes God and are awaiting the extinction of humanity, countdown clocks till which are found around every corner in the city. The player character is Rei Shimobe (Mitsuki Saiga), who awakens without any memories, but is informed by two self-proclaimed angels of God, Himeru (Aoi Yūki) and Mikotoru (Toshiyuki Morikawa), that she is a reincarnation of the Shuten Order's Founder, who was murdered and dismembered during festivities for Shuten's national day. According to the angels, Rei is in a temporary body and must clear God's Trial — identify her killer, acquire a confession, and then kill them herself — if she wants to be permanently revived. Rei can take help from the power of God in her search for the culprit, but she must use it sparingly since it is outlawed by the doctrines of the Shuten Order's religion.
The suspects for the Founder's murder are the five ministers of Shuten's government, who Rei has to investigate over the following days. The suspects are: Minister of Justice Kishiru Inugami (Daisuke Ono), a spontaneous free spirit and drug addict but an exceptional mediator; Minister of Health Yugen Ushitora (Yūki Ono), a highly skilled doctor and seemingly deeply compassionate, but pathologically meticulous; Minister of Science Teko Ion (Ayumu Murase), a charmless genius with immeasurable IQ and the designer of most technology in Shuten; Minister of Education Honoka Kokushikan (Inori Minase), a mysterious and quiet masked girl who controls and manipulates the country's spread of information; and Minister of Security Manji Fushicho (Shizuka Itō), a short tempered and aggressive public servant who mercilessly hunts down dissenters of the Shuten Order. Each minister was given possession of one of the Founder's dismembered body parts, with the exception of the torso, which went missing after the murder and is believed to be in the secret possession of the culprit.
After the game's prologue, Shuten Order diverges into multi-genre gameplay. The player is given the option to choose which one of the five suspects to pursue; this choice determines the route, and each route features a different style of gameplay. All of the routes need to be cleared to reach the game's ending, but the order is determined by the player. Any clues on the Founder's murder are stored in a list accessible to the player at all times.
Routes
In the Ministry of Justice route, Rei accompanies Inugami to an island manor for the reading of a wealthy businessman's will. When a beneficiary to the will ends up killed and the collapse of a bridge leaves the island isolated, Rei cooperates with Inugami to solve the murder. During investigations, the player must search areas and gather testimonies from other characters in a point-and-click manner. In response to certain highlighted words during dialogue, the player can snap Rei's fingers to acquire the statement as evidence. Investigations culminate in meetings, where the player will refute false statements and select evidence in response to prompts in order to solve the case. Rei has a meter for trustworthiness, which will deplete if the player finger snaps on the wrong statement during investigations or if they select the wrong option during meetings. The trustworthiness bar reaching zero will end Rei's investigation, causing a game over.
In the Ministry of Health route, Rei, Ushitora, and other affiliates of the ministry are kidnapped and forced into a series of competitive death games. The player controls Rei from a first-person perspective in three-dimensional environments and must navigate the labyrinth-esque facility where the characters are captured. Navigation will be hindered by locked doors, which must be opened by solving pentomino, connect-the-dots, and sliding puzzles. On occasion, the player must also make decisions on negotiating with other participants to survive the death game; making the wrong choice results in a game over, after which the player is sent back to remake their decision. The route features the constant livestreaming overlay of a VTuber, the death game's mastermind, who commentates on Rei's actions and on occasion gives hints to survival.
The Ministry of Education route takes the appearance of a school life dating sim. Rei is poisoned by Kokushikan and has to travel to an academy, identify which of the three students there are actually Kokushikan in disguise, and then seduce her to be given the anecdote. During the day, the player has a limited number of turns to navigate the school using a map, in search for their romantic interest and to increase their relationship points. At night, Rei meets with the girl to confess her feelings, and the player has to choose dialogue options within a limited timeframe for Rei to confess. Since the player has to engage with all three girls in a pre-determined order, Rei ends up multi-timing. The player has to diffuse the "bombs" of previous love interests by spending some of the turns to meet with them and lowering their suspicions.
In the stealth-based horror Ministry of Security route, Rei teams up with Fushicho to investigate Nephilim, a costumed serial killer in Shuten, who gouges out the eyes of his victims using a jackhammer. In between visual novel-styled dialogue with Fushicho, the player controls Rei from a top-down perspective in various levels while avoiding Nephilim. To reach the goal in each level, the player has to clear various objectives, such as pipe puzzles or placing weighted objects on pressure plates. If caught within his line of sight, Nephilim will begin to chase Rei and cause a game over upon contact. Utilities throughout the stages can be used to escape; security shutters can slow Nephilim down, and lockers can be used to hide.
The Ministry of Science route takes place within Teko's underground research lab, which gets attacked by terrorists. Rei is forced to team up with Teko to save Shuten from the threat posed if the terrorists are to reach the bottom floor of the facility. Within entirely text-based gameplay, the player controls the perspectives of multiple characters, including Rei and Teko. Each character has a flowchart that branches off based upon the player's choices. Incorrect choices will lead to a game over or dead end, either for the character in question or another; in such cases, the player must navigate the flowchart to alter the choice of the correct character.
Plot An amnesic young woman awakens in a hotel room and is greeted by two guardian angels, Himeru and Mikotoru, who give her the name Rei Shimobe and inform her that she is a reincarnation of the murdered Founder of the Shuten Order. Over the next three days, Rei sets out to identify her killer among the five ministers of Shuten as part of God's Trial so that she may achieve full resurrection. Throughout her investigations, Rei learns several truths about the Shuten Order. Its citizens, and Rei herself, are in fact droids, and the "God" detested by the cult actually refers to the droids' creators — humans, who are on the verge of extinction — and the power of God used by Rei is in reality computer hacking. In each route, Rei fails to identify the culprit and meets her own death instead, only to awaken once again in the hotel room at the start of the same four-day period, without recollection of the preceding events.
After dying in every route, Rei awakens on the fourth day and retains the memories from all of her investigations. Rei and the ministers gather in the Shuten Order's main office for an assembly conference surrounding the Founder's murder. Rei correctly surmises the culprit as Manji Fushicho, due to Fushicho having expressed her love for the Founder as a woman, a fact the Founder kept hidden about herself until her death. At this, Fushicho runs away when cornered. Rei and Kishiru Inugami track her down to the hotel where Rei awakened, only to find that every guest room contains an exact copy of Rei still asleep. Fushicho appears and explains that Rei/the Founder is a special hive-type droid who is revived upon dying by having her memory transferred into another body; the hotel, Fushicho explains, is where these spare bodies are stored. It is revealed that the five routes were not timeloops, but rather five of Rei's bodies activating simultaneously.
Within Rei's subconscious, she meets with the fading personality of her past self as the Founder, who explains the background to the Shuten Order. Several decades ago, humans constructed factories capable of mass-producing hyper intelligent and humanstic droids, who became ubiquitous as tools and servants. Later, a mass extinction event caused all lifeforms on Earth to lose their reproductive capabilities; a war subsequently broke out amongst humans, and droids were sent out to fight on the battlefields. Rei (SMB Type-0) was a hive-type fighter droid created for this war. Amongst growing anti-droid sentiment, Dr. Mikoto, the scientist who developed Type-0, was instructed to create an Elimination Code capable of factory resetting all droids; however, due to his moral qualms about having sent out droids to suffer and die in war, he also created a second Elimination Code that would grant droids freedom by removing the code preventing them from attacking humans. Type-0 was entrusted both Elimination Codes but was unable to pick between saving humans or droids. Instead, she used neither and created the land of Shuten as a safe haven for droids, while safeguarding the codes in her torso. Additionally, the Founder decided to make her gender unknown to the Shuten Order, with this being known to none but Teko Ion.