Shishimai Rinka was a high schooler who ran a small café named Lion House in place of her grandmother. She lived her life much like any other person her age, but one day, she was caught up in an explosion while returning home on the train alongside her friend, Hitsuji Naomi. In an attempt to save her friend’s life, she shields her on instinct the moment the explosion goes off, losing her life in the process. However, before she knew it, she was back at Lion House, happily chatting with her friends as if nothing had happened in the first place.

Gruesome Entertainment

The “death game” seems to have become an extremely popular story trope in media over the past decade or so. Stories that involve shoving people (often children or teenagers) into a game of survival, forcing them to kill each other if they want to win. It’s a pretty morbid topic if you think about it, but it’s also wildly popular.

The video game medium is, of course, no stranger to these stories. Hell, the current darling genre of multiplayer gaming is the “battle royale” game, with games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite being heavily influenced by death game literature like The Hunger Games and the eponymous Battle Royale.

Everyone’s favorite fusion of gaming and literature, the visual novel, has tackled the genre many times as well. Surprisingly, for such a niche genre in the west, its the entries with death games that seem to have a better chance of permeating into the mainstream. Series like Zero Escape and Danganronpa have reached the point where even some casual gamers will recognize the names.

Continuing on with this current murderous fad, the game we are looking at today is also about a death game. There’s one new twist though…all of the participants are already dead!

Developed by aieuoKompany and published in the west by Sekai Project, Fatal Twelve was released on March 30th, 2018, exclusively for PC via Steam.

There Can Be Only One

Fatal Twelve follows Shishimai Rinka, a rather average high school student. While traveling home on a train with one of her friends, though, she winds up caught in an explosion in the train car. She manages to shield her friend from the blast, but loses her own life in return.

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