Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter Episode 1 Review – Ace Attorney Tackles Danganronpa

Having a visual novel that is inspired by the Danganronpa series isn’t exactly new ground. Sometimes, like with the case of Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter, the inspirations don’t stop at Danganronpa. There are a lot of inspirations that fill this game that intrigued me enough to check it out.

Game Name: Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter
Platform(s): PC
Reviewed On: PC
Developer(s): Mango Factory
Publisher(s): Akupara Games
Release Date: April 23rd, 2026
Price: $14.99 (Price for the game increases as a new episode releases)

In the world of Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter, the Empire of Japan still exists in an underground bunker. There lies a class of the Absolute. Students who were the very best in their field. Becoming an Absolute means you are at the very top of your role. This role can be as impressive as that of an Absolute prosecutor who is always thinking about the facts and how they matter to a case. It can also just be someone who is the Absolute Conspiracy Theorist who has a theory for literally anything ever. The main character you will be playing in Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter is Himari Sanada. She is the Absolute Barista. You wake up in a mysterious classroom with no remembrance of where you are or how you got there.

Himari soon finds herself among 15 other students, each with an Absolute rank of their own. Soon, an announcement on the speaker echoes out in the area asking the students to meet at the gymnasium. As they get there, a cat-like creature is there to explain things. All the Absolute students are here for an experiment on the emotion of Apathy. To force this experiment, only two students are allowed to make it out of the building alive. Which means this cat intends to force these students to kill each other.

Surviving The Death Game

In Episode 1, a lot of your in-game time will be accounted for in story segments and objectives. When you do finally get some free time on certain days, you can talk to any of the Absolute students you come in contact with. You only have one or two people you can spend time with in the day. Spending time with people increases your bond with them. Increasing your bond will generally give you some more insight into the person as they reveal more information about their home life.

You are given the hub floor, which has a nurse’s office, a mysterious AV room, a prize corner, and a bunch of classrooms. You can walk around there and investigate a series of objects to help get yourself situated. Later on, you get access to the second floor, which has rooms for all of the 16 Absolute students, a kitchen, a storage room, and a locker room with a shower. This floor also has strange things you can investigate to get yourself situated. The prize corner has an arcade that you can play, and a kitty grab machine, which is a normal claw machine that lets you grab prizes. Giving students gifts also increases their bond level with you.

Clinical Trials

Even though you can try your best to survive, it doesn’t account for everyone else’s actions in Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter. Some students will try to do the murder game if it means they can leave this abode of isolation. When that happens, it will be up to you and this cast of colorful characters to investigate the area and discover who the murderer is. This requires inspecting the body, talking to other students about their testimony and alibi during the attack, as well as any room that may serve as a clue to the murder.

Once all the information is found, a clinical trial will begin. This chaos is what happens when you combine Among Us and Ace Attorney. Everyone wants to be a detective and tell you their story about what happened and why they think that. You have to help point the conversation towards finding the actual killer. This can be by refuting points they give you with pointing out facts, or by calming them down with a card battler mini game.

The first type of convincing the group comes in the mini game War of Words. This will have some of the people discussing things over and over for a period of time, and you have to use the highlighted words to find out what you should focus on to keep the conversation and deduction going. You can use a button to add a word from their arguments to your repertoire of evidence, or another button to throw a highlighted piece of evidence towards another word, and destroy their whole argument. It can be quite thrilling, especially as you get the “Objection” moments reminiscent of Ace Attorney.

When you finally get to a point where you push certain arguments into a corner, you will start a card battle debate. This is a game where you have to go fast with choosing a color that beats your opponent or a number that is higher than your opponent’s. If you don’t have a card to beat theirs, you skip your turn to draw two additional cards. They can throw another card at you after you skip, or draw two cards of their own. Your goal is to get the bar all the way to the right side. It starts in the center, and as they throw cards at you, the bar shifts to the left based on the card number they throw at you. You can retaliate with a card of your own to push it the other direction. If you use a card color that is strong against theirs, you get an additional turn before they can go. You can use this turn to throw a card you don’t like onto them without retaliation or to draw an additional two cards to prepare for more of their card attacks.

Visualizing Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter

One of the best aspects of Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter is the visual style. It is inspired by the art aesthetic of Urusei Yatsura. Think along the lines of the 1980s anime series or the 2008 OVA. All the character designs are unique and have stellar visual silhouettes. Faces are very expressive and convey emotion. Certain beats of the narrative made me tear up because of the way these faces showed their sadness or anger. It also helped that a lot of the best scenes of this game were voiced. Not a lot of the game is voiced, but the development team did a really good job of figuring out which were the important beats to hit with voice acting.

The music of Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter did a phenomenal job of helping express the way you should be feeling in the game. It does a good job of ramping up the moments that are important. The music could also make you feel uneasy. Each character’s theme fits their personalities well, too. The top left corner would tell you the name of the song from the soundtrack when it hit during dialogue scenes.

I played the entirety of my time on the Steam Deck. It wasn’t a locked 60 FPS, but it was pretty close most of the time. I only had a single instance where it got below 50 FPS. So the main range would be between 60 – 55 FPS. This makes the game very playable on the Steam Deck. Highly recommend playing this on handheld too.

The Verdict

Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter is a video game drenched with passion and love towards the titles that inspired it. It does a good job of creating an experience that will stick with you. My only complaint in my time with the game is how they teach you the card battle debate game super early on, and only use it at the end of the episode. I hope Episode 2 lets us utilize it a bit more. I am eagerly awaiting the next Episode. If you love Ace Attorney or Danganronpa, then I would highly recommend this title.

Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter Episode 1 is available on PC. You can also try out the demo in case you want to see how it plays before you buy.

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Review Disclosure Statement: Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter was provided to us by Akupara Games for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.