死に逝く君、館に芽吹く憎悪 Review

Shiniyuki Kimi Yakata ni Mebuku Zouo, also known as Nikuniku, is a eroge released by Bug System in 2016 written by the prolific Ban'ya. Like many of Ban'ya's other works, it features a decently ambitious story despite being largely marketed as a guro nukige.

The game's narrative and themes are centered around some classic but never boring questions: how do we define morality? Should morality be viewed subjectively or objectively? How do we find meaning in our lives? Are some ways of living more just or meaningful than others? Ban'ya provides satisfactory but not particularly in-depth or ground-breaking interpretations of these ideas. This trend of being satisfactory but not notably interesting is something that is echoed across most aspects of this game.

The story is interesting and for the most part well paced but there wasn't anything about it that stood out specifically for me. There's some neat lore and worldbuilding that doesn't really get expanded on in-depth, but gives some nice flavour to the game as a whole. The OST is fitting but again, nothing really stood out to me in particular. The art quality is good but not great and the CG quality varies from kind of iffy to nicely done and comfy. There's also a nice amount of CGs despite the short length of the game however the guro CGs were markedly disappointing. There's a lot of guro scenes but they're all... kind of boring despite the very evocative title. I don't personally think Rubi-sama's art was a good match here. Her art style is very upbeat and her anatomy is honestly not very good, which lead to kind of silly or goofy looking guro CGs. The scenes themselves are also a little bit generic; there were a handful that were nice but I felt pretty lukewarm towards the majority.

That's not to say that Nikuniku was only middling all the way through. 美亜's voice acting especially was great and the actress' ability to gutturally wail from the depths of despair caught me off guard. The overall tone and atmosphere of the game was also well executed; OST placement and Ban'ya's balancing of lighthearted comfy scenes with darker scenes were all used to pretty good effect. The abundance of guro scenes also meant there was a constant, simmering fear for 美亜's safety and what would happen next to her. Finally, 美亜 and 上位種族の男 were both pretty interesting as a protagonist-antagonist pair. Neither of them fell into generic nukige tropes; I genuinely liked 美亜 and thought she was pretty well fleshed out (or as fleshed out as she could be, considering the game's short length). The 上位種族の男 also had some sides to him that I wasn't really expecting. Both of them were pretty refreshing and both receive some nice character development by the end of the game.

All in all, Nikuniku is an ambitious little game that unfortunately fell short in its execution. While I appreciate the ideas it had, the game unfortunately felt too short to flesh many of those ideas out. As a result the game felt tepid both as a philosophical narrative and as a guro nukige. In spite of this, it succeeded in being a tense, atmospheric game with notably well-written characters. I would recommend this if you're a fan of guro games and are looking for something different, but caution you to keep your expectations modest.

6/10