Visual novel fans can grab a bargain this weekend: some of the best PC games in the genre, including the Danganronpa, Zero Escape and Steins;Gate series, are heavily discounted until Monday as part of developer Spike Chunsoft's sale.

It's worth browsing through the full list of offers, but Danganronpa is a good place to start: the first two games in the series are 80% off, making them just $4/£3. You play a new student in what appears to be a school for an elite, but is actually a sadistic battle royale, and you have to kill another student to "graduate". As characters are murdered, you're asked to solve the crime in court trials that play out a little like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. It's brilliant, and you can read Andy's review of the first game, Trigger Happy Havoc, here.

Both Zero Escape games—The Nonary Games and Zero Time Dilemma—are 80% off too, making them less than $6/£5. They're gruesome tales of a group trapped in an underground facility, and they have arguably the best puzzles of any visual novel. Katharine gave The Nonary Games a 90/100 in her review.

Steins;Gate Eilte, a remaster of the 2009 original, and the follow up Steins;Gate 0 are less about murder and more about time travel. You alter the past to create branching worlds, tangling together cause and effect into a variety of different endings. It's complex, but never hard to follow. Both games are 60% off.

Fire Pro Wrestling World, one of our favorite sports games, is also on the list at 70% off. Browse through all the deals on Spike Chunsoft's Steam page: again, the Danganronpa games are the perfect place to start if you're new to the genre, not least because they're so cheap. The deals expire at 10am PDT on Monday, August 12.

If you need more advice about getting into visuals novels, follow our guide here.

A look at some our recent Game of the Year winners—Spelunky, Metal Gear Solid V, Dishonored 2—suggests that baked-in narratives are less important to us than personal stories plotted by physics and AI. That's broadly true, but not to the total exclusion of videogame storytelling, of characters and dialogue and, to give an overarching definition of what we mean by 'story' in this case, 'sequences of events which may be influenced by the player but are not authored by them.' The setting, the conflict, the reasons characters act (through us) and the consequences for those characters. You know, stories. 

Some say games are bad vehicles for this kind of storytelling, full stop. Others argue that while the stories in games are often bad, it's the fault of the storytellers, not the medium. And yet another camp argues that games are the greatest storytelling medium of all time. In listing our favorite stories, we will resolve exactly zero of these contradictory views. Unconcerned with theory for the moment, we just want to celebrate the stories that stuck with us, and recommend a few games for those who love to be told a good tale. Here are our favorites, as picked by regular PC Gamer writers Samuel Horti and Richard Cobbett, as well as the whole team:

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice 

Hellblade is an important game, not just because of the subject matter it tackles—a young woman’s struggle with psychosis—but also because it proves that modern-day audiences are willing to listen to developers that want to tackle difficult themes.

Pict warrior Senua is on a journey to retrieve her lover’s soul from the depths of the Norse underworld of Helheim, and she’s prepared to go up against the gods to do it. Her battles with towering, undead Vikings mirror her struggles against her inner demons, and through sparse writing and long, lingering close-ups of Senua’s face you really feel her pain. She bares her soul to the player, and it’s utterly moving.

The inner struggle is the one the game wants you to focus on, but there’s still subtlety on the surface, too: you can look back at the end of it and think about how Senua’s outward journey reflected her inner torment, making connections that weren’t obvious at the time. 

The Thief trilogy 

The first Thief game tells a neat noir story complete with dry narration from a cynical protagonist and a femme fatale who hires him for a dangerous job. The end result of its tangled plot has him stealing from a god of chaos and changing the world. Thief grows from a simple mash-up of hard-boiled fiction and steampunk into something much more complex. Over the course of the next two games it explores the religious consequences of a god's death and the Mechanists who rise in his absence, and by the third game follows those explorations of chaos and order by focusing on corruption within the Keepers, the group dedicated to balance Garrett left behind at the start of that first game.

There's a neatly cyclical quality to the three Thief games, which end where they began—not just with the Keepers, but with a scene of a child being caught pickpocketing. Only where once Garrett was the kid, now he's the adult deciding the fate of that child. So many videogame heroes get dragged back again and again, long after their story is done, so Garrett having such a complete arc is a pleasant rarity. The reboot's Garrett could never live up to it.

What Remains of Edith Finch

The overarching tale of the Finch family is full of intrigue, but it’s the individual stories of each family member that stand out. Returning to the family home as the titular Edith, you poke around the abandoned house, slipping in and out of the memories of the various characters as you gradually piece together a moving tragedy.

Each is told as an inventive mini-game. You transform into a shark, chop fish on a production line and listen to poetry while flying a kite. The simple mechanics provide the perfect window to learn about the personalities of each family member. These vignettes are moving, and deceptively layered and rich, changing your perception of what you’ve heard before while also advancing the overarching plot. The game offers a masterclass in environmental storytelling, too, with each object in the house giving you a new insight into the family.

Quite simply, it’s the pinnacle of the first-person narrative game genre, and toppling it will take some doing.

Mafia and Mafia 2 

The first two Mafia games each contain their own compelling stories, built from familiar cinematic influences—but the first is my favourite, telling a more sympathetic tale of cab driver Tommy Angelo being drawn into the criminal underworld, before finally trying to escape it. The cutscenes look like they're being acted out by Gerry Anderson puppets by today's standards, but it felt like careful attention was paid to the writing, cinematography and use of music in Mafia's story—plus the smoke effects are still nice. The shock ending, which we won't ruin here, ties into Mafia 2 in an utterly dazzling way. 

Mafia 2, meanwhile, focuses on Vito Scaletta and his best friend Joe some years later. Vito gets into the mob to clear his family's debts, following a memorably boring sequence where you work at the docks, doing legitimate and repetitive work until you choose to walk away. The story ends somewhat abruptly, though some might argue that elevates its closing moments, but the friendship between the two main characters is what I remember loving about Mafia 2, as well as believing this story was actually taking place across two decades.

Her Story

You’d think that if you take a murder mystery, chop it into bits and deliver all those parts in the wrong order then the resultant story would be a mess. And in most cases you’d be right. But not in Her Story. You flick through a database of police interviews with a young woman, pulling up clips by searching for keywords and watching them on a battered CRT monitor. Each video reveals a piece of the jigsaw, and it’s your job to slot them all together in your mind.

The minimalist presentation wouldn’t work without astonishing acting and tight, punchy writing. Through a single screen the game depicts more drama than most blockbuster movies. Each clip you watch changes your mind about the case, and then the next clip makes you realise just how wrong you were again.

It’s a showcase of ambiguous storytelling done right. Even if you watch every single clip, and therefore know what every jigsaw piece looks like, the overall picture will still be blurred by your own interpretations and preconceptions. It means different things to different players, and you learn something new every time you play.

Bioshock 2 

While it’s the first game that gets all the attention for its fantastic concept, it’s Bioshock 2 that’s secretly the high point of the series. Under Jordan Thomas and his crew, a story once primarily about a city became a story of its people. The victims of Rapture. The next generation, emerging as butterflies from a cocoon of poverty and deprivation. It told real stories of people who followed a dream, only to realise that they were in service to someone else’s. And then of course there was Eleanor—Lamb of Rapture, and far superior as a character than Bioshock Infinite’s Lamb of Columbia. Through actions rather than words, you guided her nascent morality in a world where morality was routed in human concern rather than big plot twists, as the ‘dadification’ of gaming arguably reached its zenith. This wasn’t your story. It was your merely your privilege to begin hers.

To the Moon

An emotionally draining game that has caused many a tear to drop on our keyboards. To the Moon's premise seems overly complex at first: in the future, a company can travel into your mind and implant new memories in a way so that present time-you believes them to be true. But really, it’s a story about one man’s dying wish to visit the moon, hence the title.

The game take’s place inside the memories of that man, called John. You travel backwards through his mind step-by-step. So at the beginning of the story you pick up mysteries, and as you go back in time those mysteries unpack themselves piece by piece (wait until you know what that rabbit means—you’ll weep). It never hits you over the head with anything, which means you feel clever for picking up on its nuances.

But its intelligence is not what sticks with you. The memorable bit is the game’s exploration of love, loss and regret, all three wrapped together in something that’s a comedy one minute (it’s seriously funny in places) and a tragedy the next.

Realms of the Haunting

This obscure British gem has enjoyed something of a resurgence of late, and justifiably so. While the script is more than a little on-the-nose and the basic concept is a fairly stock haunted house setting giving way to a fairly stock battle between good and evil, it’s not really the plot itself that makes ROTH so special. It’s the details, some of which may actually contain the devil.

Few fantasy or horror games have presented such a wonderfully fleshed out world—the sense of stepping into something bigger than you could ever comprehend, with every scrap of it meticulously detailed and woven into a grand tapestry. Ignore the relatively primitive 3D engine. The joy of ROTH is in the descent to understanding, dealing with powers, and the moments of compassion that emerge from it, like being faced with a trial from a seemingly implacable god willing to bend the unbreakable rules of his domain because your situation is so dire as to have drawn his impossible pity. It was a world that dripped with fantastical history long before the likes of Dark Souls were a glint in their creators’ sadistic eyes, and remains a beautiful obscurity that badly deserved its sequel.

Grand Theft Auto IV

GTA IV dialled back the wacky, fun stuff of San Andreas—military jets, jetpacks, getting fat from eating burgers—in favour of a sober story set in a stunningly realistic interpretation of New York, Liberty City. This meant that, as an open world game, GTA had less moments of large-scale, thrilling chaos than we'd eventually see in GTA V, but the flipside of that was a more interesting story. GTA IV is a pretty sincere tale—and it has a few thematic links with Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption, which also has a protagonist who can't really escape his past life. 

Niko Bellic, an Eastern European veteran who comes to Liberty City to start again, soon finds himself dragged back into a life of killing. The tragedy of Niko is that you sense he knows it's the one thing he's best at. It's melodramatic but effective—a daring effort to bring GTA into the modern age with a more dramatic story.

The Yawhg

The Yawhg is coming, and it isn't going to be good, and that's all you know. This fantastic little game sends up to four players around town to prepare for that coming disaster, and each simple decision—teach the king your seductive techniques or let him flounder?—can lead to terrible things at the end of the brief adventure (or rarely, something good). The writing is concise, unembellished, and biting; simple fantasy tales that may end with stolid brutality or newfound wisdom, whether you spend a week drinking in the tavern or meditating in the garden.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc 

Danganronpa stands out from other visual novels because, rather than a game about making decisions, it's a game about making deductions. You play as one of 15 students trapped in an elite school where the only way to graduate (read: escape) is to kill a classmate and get away with it by lying and framing your way through a murder trial. If anyone pulls it off, the remaining students will also be killed, so everyone has a stake in every trial—doubly so if you've grown attached to the victim or the prime suspect. 

The process of collecting, considering and presenting evidence makes for a far more interactive experience than merely navigating dialogue, and the trials work because Danganronpa has colorful and interesting characters you won't want to see die. They look like one-note caricatures at first glance, but you start to see different sides of everyone as antagonist Monokuma ratchets up the stakes with unique twists. It becomes clearer and clearer that everyone has something to hide, and the dread of suddenly losing a favorite character, or accusing one of murder, should not be underestimated.

A Mind Forever Voyaging

When did games get so political, people demand. Well, try 1985, with one of the most beloved text adventures not to involve hitchhiking around the galaxy or exploring an underground kingdom. A Mind Forever Voyaging is interactive fiction doing something that no other medium could do—to put you into a world, and let exploration tell its story. Yes, in many ways, this was the first walking simulator—its setting, a Matrix style recreation of a small American town, and you a sentient computer program charged with stepping into progressive simulations of the future under a popular senator’s Plan For Renewed National Purpose. Needless to say, it doesn’t go well. Over the course of the game you experience America’s collapse around you, complete with now familiar sites collapsing into decay and your own family becoming victims of an oppressive theocratic regime. Can you stop it, despite your only presence in the real world being as a scrap of data on a computer?  

Mass Effect 2

A solid space romp from start to finish. A lot of RPGs struggle to sustain forward momentum for more than a few hours at a time, but Mass Effect 2 does it for 30, constantly nudging you from one point in the galaxy to the next by presenting you with a series of interesting missions, each containing its own short story. It gets the balance just right between exposition and action, with enough big set pieces to keep you on your toes.

The characters are the glue holding it together. The series has some of the best personalities you’ll find in games (and Garrus might just be the best NPC of all time). Walking around the Normandy after a mission to hear the quips of each crew member in turn is a joy, and you can dig even deeper into their personalities in the companion missions, which provide some of the best moments in the entire series. Learning more about them, and forming these personal ties, lends more weight to the overall plot. Even though you might not care about the Geth or the Reapers or the fate of humanity, you care about your crew, and whether they make it out of the game’s bombastic ending alive.

It also has the benefit of being able to incorporate the decisions you made in the first game, which makes for a richer, more personal tale. It’s an excellent space opera that Bioware struggled to better in both Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda, and a game against which all their future titles will rightly be measured.

The Witcher 3 

What can we say about The Witcher 3 that hasn’t already been shouted from the rooftops? The Bloody Baron quest alone warrants its place on our list. To focus just on that would be a mistake though, as barely a moment goes by without a reminder that CD Projekt are playing in a different league to almost every other RPG studio out there. It’s in the plots, which effortlessly merge myth and fairy tale and fantasy. It’s in the humour that underlines everything. It’s in the cheeky imagination of a studio as happy to have you chase after a missing stone phallus as your long-lost adopted daughter. But mostly, it’s about seeing this wonderful world through the practiced neutrality of Geralt himself—a man who can’t stop his compassion and sympathy bleeding out through his stoic front, no matter how much it might make his life easier. What many games demand long cutscenes to tell, this one often handles with nothing more than a subtle eye animation, or an obvious opinion held back. The Witcher 3 tells great stories, but it’s how they all weave together and filter through their star and his unique perspective that really makes them special. 

Analogue: A Hate Story 

Investigating an abandoned spacecraft inhabited by untrustworthy AI is a videogame staple, and it's been done well (most recently in Prey). Analogue: A Hate Story is different. For starters it's a visual novel rather than an immersive sim, and also it's an exploration of the societal pressures on women in Joseon-period Korea.

The spaceship Mugunghwa (named after South Korea's national flower) is a multi-generational slower-than-light colony ship whose inhabitants, over the centuries, regressed to a feudal society that somehow collapsed 600 years before your investigation begins. In other games like this you might read emails about changing the passwords on the armory—in Analogue the logs tell the story of competing dynasties in a society where women are forbidden from learning to read and write (but do so anyway). It's historical fiction wrapped in sci-fi trappings that bounces the two off each other, you and your new AI companions examining and reacting to the text as you go. It's about how the past isn't as far behind us as we like to think, and has a thematic richness that honestly puts a lot of other games to shame.

Oxenfree 

Here are the ingredients: a spooky deserted island; a group of quirky teens who are better at banter than any of us; a mystery involving radio frequencies. Saying any more than that about Oxenfree's story is tricky, because it's a twisty one. Fortunately it's not just a great story because it will surprise you, but because of how it's told, which is in naturalistic dialogue any Kevin Williamson movie would be proud of. Characters talk over each other freely and you can interrupt them as well—when you make a dialogue choice you're never sure if Alex, the protagonist, will save it for the next gap in conversation or blurt it out immediately. 

So many games have a scene where somebody interrupts someone else, but what actually happens is that character A stops abruptly, there's a significant pause, and then character B jumps in with a line obviously recorded in a different session, possibly in a different country. Oxenfree doesn't do that. Its dialogue has a flow that you can get caught up in, so you're already engaged even before its plot uncurls and rears up in your face.

Soma

What does it mean to be alive? Sci-fi stories have grappled with the thought for decades, largely telling the same sad story over and over again. Who would’ve thought that the developers of the classic Amnesia: The Dark Descent would follow up with one of the most gripping, mind-bending, horrifying takes of all in Soma? Maybe it just took inhabiting the body of a character inhabiting a dead body to give the premise the punch it’s been needing. Its optimistic ending is the biggest surprise, given that you’re repeatedly confronted with puzzles that risk the lives of junkpile robots also harboring a human consciousness inside them. They might look like rusting mounds of metal plates and bolts, but they’ll also tell you they’re happy and don’t want to die. What if a human with their guts hanging out told you the same thing? Renegade and Paragon alignments won’t help you. 

Deranged monsters roam the halls (and you can turn them off now), but they too are confused, semi-conscious beings in unfamiliar bodies. They’re mostly a sideshow to the main attraction, the underwater research station built to harbor the remnants of humanity after a comet devastated the surface. In order to discover who you really are and save whatever you can of humanity on a glorified USB stick, you’ll need to descend to places without light or life in some of the most oppressive, uncomfortable underwater environments this side of Bioshock. But for every plot twist Rapture holds, Soma has two, and they’re all going to make you feel like shit. 

Clichés dominate visual novels, but there’s so much more to this genre than just steamy romance or mundane slices of Japanese students’ lives. Over the past few years, more and more talented developers are creating experimental games, shorter novella-like experiences, and clever subversions of the anime tropes that started it all. Visual novels are finally cool.

Choosing where to start can be intimidating, however. If you’ve missed the boat up until this point and want to catch up, we’ve put together a list of the best visual novels on PC, from the traditional Japanese games that kickstarted the genre to the more ambitious and unique takes on the format. 

It’s by no means a comprehensive list of every visual novel you should play, and we heartily recommend you scour through itch.io for its hidden indie gems under the visual novel tag. But if you’re looking to get started, these are the best visual novels on PC.

Clannad 

Developer: KeyRelease date: November 23, 2015Link: Steam page

Only released on PC in the West just a couple of years ago, Clannad is one of the most popular visual novels ever—spawning an anime, a film, manga, and even an audio drama. It tells the story of Tomoya Okazaki, a “delinquent” (Clannad’s words, not mine) struggling with an existential crisis. He meets Nagisa Furukawa, another “delinquent” who he resonates with, and they begin working together to restart the school drama club, enlisting other students along the way. 

Clannad is the place to go if you like the stereotypes of visual novels. It was originally released in 2004, and perfectly shows the merits of the genre even if it feels like familiar territory at this point. Where visual novels shine is in strong writing, interesting characters, and a perspective that can draw you in. Even without the bells and whistles of modern visual novels, Clannad does exactly that.

It’s a story about a young man learning how making his own happiness. Tomoya’s story can be seen as analogous to depression, and yet it doesn’t quite fall into the trap of manic pixie dream girls, but of finding something in a life marked by tragedy. It may seem cliché, but that’s not because it’s unoriginal: it’s because people have been copying Clannad for over a decade.

The Nonary Games/Zero Time Dilemma (the Zero Escape series) 

Developer: Spike ChunsoftRelease date: March 24, 2017Link: Steam page 

If you enjoy getting your hands dirty with puzzles, the Zero Escape series is perhaps your best bet. There are three games in this series: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors; Virtue’s Last Reward; and Zero Time Dilemma. The first two were only ported to PC in 2017 (with remastered visuals and new voice acting), as a pack called The Nonary Games, while Zero Time Dilemma stands on its own.

In each game, nine people are locked in a place by a mysterious figure using the name Zero. They’re each fitted with watches that each display a number, and told that they must escape whatever place they’re in by working through puzzles contained by nine doors. It all gets a bit Saw-like when people start dying in gruesome ways, such as acid showers and bombs inserted into people’s stomachs.

You’re not just reading the whole time, either. Point-and-click segments challenge you to solve puzzles to escape through each door. Some of these puzzles get pretty difficult as you go on, like having to decipher an unknown language made of symbols. They never feel like a cop-out, there’s rarely anything as simple as having to solve a Tower of Hanoi puzzle for the umpteenth time.

Zero Escape is grim, but the story is fascinating and well told. Choices you make result in different endings, and the games play into it in a way no other visual novel really has. The way that you, the player (as opposed to you, the character), can have knowledge that characters don’t, in a form of dramatic irony, is executed brilliantly when you have different timelines and endings to consider.

Ladykiller in a Bind 

Developer: Love Conquers All GamesRelease date: October 10, 2016Link: Steam page

The full title of Ladykiller in a Bind is ‘My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress as Him and Now I Have to Deal with a Geeky Stalker and a Domme Beauty Who Want Me in a Bind!!’ But try to forget that. As a somewhat traditionally styled visual novel, Ladykiller in a Bind is about socially manipulating a bunch of lusty teenagers. The setting is what rich kids might call a school trip and the rest of us might call a once-in-a-lifetime holiday on a cruise. You’re The Beast, a lesbian who isn’t shy from flirting or going back to the bedroom. The Beast has been forced by her twin brother, a manipulative asshole, to pretend to be him for mysterious reasons on this cruise where she wants to be sleeping around, but must keep up appearances so as not to arouse suspicion.

Social manipulation is the name of the game, choosing the rights words and phrases in the midst of conversation to maintain your disguise as your twin brother while also trying to get with every woman on the cruise. This mix of social manipulation and playing an asshole (who is, in herself, pretending to be even more of an asshole) is executed brilliantly, and, if you choose to, results in more than a few steamy scenes with other students.

Ladykiller in a Bind is an unquestionably adult game. Although you can turn sex scenes off and hide nudity, you get to know those characters much more intimately in what are genuinely well-written sex scenes—none of the fluff you found knocking about your aunt’s bookcase.

Steins;Gate

Developer: 5pb.Release date: September 8, 2016Link: Steam page

Steins;Gate is a tale of time travel that explores the complicated web of cause and effect. Rintarō Okabe, a mad scientist who acts as the protagonist, has created a time machine where he can send text messages into the past. Using it, he and others begin to work towards improving the future by influencing past actions.

Twisting, branching paths are a staple of the visual novel genre—the Zero Escape series explores how it can be used to great effect too—but Steins;Gate’s use of time travel gets wild. Cause and effect become tangled, the actions of the future affect the past and plunge characters into totally unforseen situations. All sorts of major things can change depending on if you just answer your phone.

The story never becomes too confusing, thankfully, and Steins;Gate makes every ending count, even the ones where you royally screwed up. Because of that, you see all the characters in a variety of ways, from their best to their worst. Afterwards, they feel fleshed out in a way that would otherwise be impossible.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc 

Developer: Spike ChunsoftRelease date: February 18, 2016Link: Steam page

It’s likely that Danganronpa is at least partially responsible for the growing popularity of visual novels outside of Japan. Similarly to Zero Escape, it combines visual novel elements with puzzle solving as a group of students realize that Japan’s most prestigious private school is actually a murderous battle royale of wits. 

To escape, a student must murder another and then survive a courtroom trial held by their peers. Once other students begin murdering each other, as protagonist Makoto Naegi it’s your job to gather clues, question suspects, present your case, and find the culprit. 

The court cases aren’t just a series of dialogue choices but literal shootouts. Armed with truth bullets, each of which represent a bit of evidence you’ve found, you can back up or refute claims from other students. If you find the murder weapon, for example, you can refute a student who says there’s no weapon by shooting the text as it crosses the screen. You’ve got to pay attention, watching for gaps in logic and working out which piece of evidence proves you’re right.

All of the writing and character designs are funny, a contrast to the grim atmosphere of a game about students murdering each other in fits of desperation, with the mysterious and antagonistic Monobear egging them on in crueler and crueler ways. It’s an utterly absurd cast, but sitting them next to such a dark setting highlights how well they’re all written.

Simulacra 

Developer: Kaigan GamesRelease date: October 26, 2017Link: Steam page 

The visual novel genre isn’t quite as limiting as it may seem, and Simulacra is one of the best examples of how it doesn’t quite have to fit the style you might expect. It’s described as a “found phone” game, a genre that has recently become somewhat popular with games like Bury Me, My Love and A Normal Lost Phone. 

You find a phone on your doorstep, which you soon discover was owned by a woman called Anna, who has gone missing. A short video which she filmed shortly before her disappearance implies something evil is afoot, with glitches and jumpcuts in the video designed to unsettle you. All of the videos and images have these subtle touches. From interface to the selfie perspective videos, the attention to detail is amazing.

Over time, you get to text her friends, go through her social media profiles, even speak to the people she was flirting with on a dating app. It’s all incredibly upsetting. Simulacra will constantly push you further into the realm of voyeurism, asking how far you’re willing to go into this woman’s life to maybe, just maybe, save her life. 

The story is only a few hours long, and there’s multiple endings depending on if you succeed in your goals. You can pretend to be Anna, questioning her friends while trying to emulate what personality you can gleam from her texts, or be open, an honest voice in trying to search for Anna. Turn down the lights, turn off your phone, and settle in for a night of amateur voyeuristic detective work for this one, because it’s worth that added atmosphere. 

Long Live The Queen 

Developer: Hanako GamesRelease date: November 8, 2013Link: Steam page

While this slot could have been taken by a number of games from Hanako, Long Live The Queen is by far their most successful in every sense of the word. It puts you in control of a princess soon to be coronated and become the queen. Oh, and she's just a kid. 

It sounds cute, but other people want that throne for themselves, and are willing to do anything to obtain it—including murder a 14-year-old girl. With her coronation 40 weeks away, it's your job to guide her through day-to-day life and make sure she survives.

Through the game, you’ll pick her studies and control aspects of her life, molding this princess into a queen, giving her the skills to rule both with grace and bravery. Like Crusader Kings 2 or Dwarf Fortress, Love Live the Queen is a wonderful game for creating anecdotes as your run will almost certainly come to an end with a grisly but funny fate. It's not necessarily about surviving the 40 weeks as much as it is filling in the pockets of subtext with your own imagination. There’s plenty of depth to it, too. As whether your live or die is not quite as simple as a random roll of the dice, and there’s all sorts of stats to manage and micromanage as the weeks pass.

VA-11 Hall-A

Developer: Sukeban GamesRelease date: June 21, 2016Link: Steam page

VA-11 Hall-A takes the perspective of a bartender in a dystopian future, giving you a unique view on life as you see people at both their best and their worst, their highs and lows.

There’s a lot to the world of VA-11 Hall-A (which is further revealed in 2064: Read Only Memories, a phenomenal point-and-click game from a different developer but in the same world), but VA-11 Hall-A focuses purely on the stories of your various patrons. In Glitch City, corporations and the White Knights impose law through nanomachines and violence, a constant surveillance state where the mythologized independence of a virtual future left a long time ago.

Of course, as the bartender, you’re hearing the voices of the people when they’re not under surveillance. The gossip, the personal stories, the fears and dreams and desires of the people. Where Simulacra is voyeuristic, VA-11 Hall-A makes you feel privileged that these people are opening up to you over a cocktail you’ve made from cyberpunk alcohol.

Because of this quite candid approach to storytelling, VA-11 Hall-A isn't a singular narrative rather than a series of vignettes into the lives of dystopian dwellers. That window is impermanent, however, as each visit will always be overshadowed by the real possibility that they might never return.

The Yawhg

Developer: Damian Sommer, Emily CarrollRelease date: May 30, 2013Link: Steam page

Sometimes a game half fits a genre and half doesn’t. The Yawhg is one such game. It's a choose-your-own-adventure for up to four local players, each of which plays a character in a town that, in six weeks, will be destroyed by the Yawhg. 

The townsfolk and your characters don’t know that the Yawhg is coming, but you, the player, do. Will you go about your day to day life normally? Or will you ring the bell, calling for the people of this town to flee as a prophet? Each decision can have dramatically different consequences.

The Yawhg bends the conventions of visual novels but still shares the same heart for storytelling, which is why it's on this list. You’re offered scenes that act more as prompts for you and friends than paragraphs of text, with both gorgeous art and a fantastic soundtrack to act as your backdrop.

That makes The Yawhg unique here, as all of the other games push you into a persona that’s already been made while The Yawhg calls you to create your own. There’s 50 endings in total, and none of them are the ‘true’ ending, just one of many options depending on the choices you and your friends make. The situations created by the game are interesting, surprising, and leave the perfect amount of room for players to add their own spin on things. The Yawhg is a prime example of how a visual novel can do wild things, and perhaps also the place to go for a tabletop RPG-like experience.

Makoto Naegi is a completely average student. There s nothing remarkable about him at all, yet he s been invited to Hope s Peak Academy, the most prestigious, exclusive school in the country. He s one of fifteen talented young people who ve been hand-picked for their brilliance in various fields, but the only reason he s among them is because he was randomly chosen in a lottery. Lucky guy! Or not, because Hope s Peak is hiding a sinister secret.

A twisted, mischievous villain called Monokuma, who appears in the form of a mechanical bear, traps the students in the school and forces them to play a sick game. The only way to leave this makeshift prison, or graduate as he calls it, is to kill another student in cold blood. And not only that, but the killer has to get away with it too. As far as nefarious plots conjured up by depraved, maniacal ursine robots go, it s pretty damn evil.

Danganronpa is a visual novel, which is a type of dialogue-heavy, largely text-based adventure game popular in Japan. You spend most of your time clicking through dialogue, being told a story rather than taking part in one. But, despite this, it s really entertaining. Rich, vivid characters, a captivating mystery that s constantly unfolding in surprising, shocking ways, and a charmingly fun sense of humour make reading through all that text an unexpected pleasure.

Your first days at Hope s Peak are spent getting to know the other students, exploring the school, and trying to escape—a task made difficult by the metal plates bolted on all the windows. They might be the smartest, most talented kids in the world, but they re a deeply weird bunch with quirks, personalities, and interesting backstories. I grew genuinely attached to some of them, which made the looming threat of one of them either killing someone or being killed themselves extra tense.

There s fiery, charismatic Mondo, the Ultimate Biker Gang Leader. Kiyotaka, the Ultimate Moral Compass, who s obsessed with rules and punctuality. Sakura, the softly spoken Ultimate Martial Artist, who looks intimidating but takes it upon herself to protect the weaker students. Ultimate Writing Prodigy Toko who has low self-esteem and thinks everyone is judging her. And that s just a few of the oddballs you ll encounter at Hope's Peak. Few games offer such a varied, fascinating, and well fleshed-out collection of characters.

Inevitably, someone decides to play along with Monokuma s sadistic game and someone is murdered. The cackling bear explains that if the group can prove who did it, the culprit will be executed. If not, everyone dies. This is when Danganronpa becomes a murder mystery with Makoto reluctantly playing the role of detective. You have to scour the school for clues, gather evidence, interview people, and then make your case in a challenging, fast-paced trial.

Trials consist of reaction-based mini-games, most of which involve listening to statements and looking for inconsistencies. When you hear something that doesn t quite add up you can load a piece of the evidence you ve gathered that contradicts it—a so-called truth bullet —into a gun and shoot their words down. You take aim at the offending sentence with a swaying crosshair and fire, which makes Makoto interject and challenge the assertion.

Trials get increasingly difficult, throwing in additional elements like barriers of white noise that can block your truth bullets. But there is a gentle difficulty setting if you re only in it for the story. If you make a mistake, like firing a bullet at an accurate statement, you lose health and eventually fail if it drops to zero. But all this means is a restart and a lower score at the end. The final stage of each trial sees you pummeling your faltering suspect with irrefutable evidence in time with the music until they eventually crack. It s enjoyably silly.

When you finally reveal the killer, you re treated to a grimly amusing cutscene in which Monokuma executes them in a manner relevant to their field of expertise. As more bodies fall, the characters become increasingly paranoid, and so do you. You worry that your favourite character is going to end up dead. And it doesn t help that Monokuma is constantly providing motives , like threatening to reveal the students deepest, darkest secrets to the world if someone doesn t die in the next 24 hours.

If you take the time to befriend your fellow students between trials, you ll grow closer to them and unlock special abilities to make your life in court easier—like increasing the time limit or steadying your crosshair. But all this talking means that Danganronpa is an incredibly long, slow-paced game. It can take around 30 hours to finish, most of which is spent reading—they don t call them visual novels for nothing. But it s a testament to the quality of the story, and the constant desire to know what absurd or disturbing thing is going to happen next, that I didn t get bored once.

Trigger Happy Havoc is actually six years old. It was first released for the PlayStation Portable back in 2010, and has since appeared on a number of mobile formats including iOS. It s fairly obvious that it s a port of a mobile game, with slightly fuzzy text and low-resolution visuals. But the detailed, colourful artwork is fantastic, and I quickly got over its technical shortcomings. The characters are static 2D images, but have more personality than the most realistic, motion-captured FPS gunbro.

Danganronpa is one of the best story-driven games on PC. The scarcity of interaction, vast quantities of text, and glacial pace will turn a lot of people off, but the story is so compelling that I barely noticed that all I was doing was clicking through lines of dialogue. Monokuma is a deliciously evil villain and the crimes are brilliantly constructed. Just when you think you ve figured them out, you ll be blind-sided by some new piece of evidence. If you love adventure games and want to experience something different, Danganronpa is worth investigating.

The long-awaited high school murder mystery Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc will release on PC February 18. That's a bit more useful than the vague, hand-wavey window of 'February' we had before. It'll set you back $30, but judging by tales from far-flung console lands it's rather good, like Agatha Christie meets animatronic teddy bears bumping off students.

Andy will have a rather more comprehensive account of Danganronpa ready for you later this month—he's already penned an overview if my description failed to enlighten. The quality of the port should be prime concern for Spike Chunsoft, which has indicated that Danganronpa 2 and a host of Japanese imports will be finding their way to the PC in the near future. It wouldn't do to get off on the wrong foot.

Buy Danganronpa in its first week of release and you'll get the limited-edition soundtrack thrown in. It might sound like a toddler stuck in an orchestra pit for all I know, but oooo, free stuff!

As recently as a year ago, the possibility of a Danganronpa game coming to Steam seemed very remote indeed. Developed by Japanese studio Spike Chunsoft, these games have traditionally arrived exclusively on consoles, but that's about to change dramatically: in addition to the already confirmed Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, its sequel is also coming to PC.

The studio confirmed to Siliconera that Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair will also hit Steam in the near future. Not only that, but the company also indicated that more of its games will come to the platform. As a quick scan of the studio's Wikipedia page will show, Spike Chunsoft has been quite prolific since Spike and Chunsoft merged in 2012. In edition to yet another Danganronpa game, the studio is also releasing One Piece: Burning Blood this year and that's already confirmed for PC.

You probably don't need reminding, but Japanese studios and publishers are increasingly open to releasing their games on PC. The Final Fantasy series is the most notable example, but last year's Tales of Zestiria port was very good news, too. 

It was recently announced that, in February, a six-year-old PlayStation Portable game called Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is coming to Steam. Some people, myself included, are very excited about this. But why? What even is Danganronpa? And why should you care about an old PSP game coming to PC?

Danganronpa is a visual novel—a type of dialogue-heavy, largely text-based adventure game popular in Japan. It s about a group of students who think they ve been invited to study at an elite school called Hope s Peak Academy, but have in fact become unwitting pawns in a sinister, deadly game. Trapped in the school by a mysterious villain called Monokuma—who appears in the form of a terrifying mechanical bear—the only way to escape is to kill another student and get away with it.

The students have been carefully hand-picked as the very best in various fields including programming, martial arts, singing, and, er, writing fan fiction. You, on the other hand, are a nobody. A completely average student with no special skills who randomly won a place at Hope s Peak in a lottery. This earns you the title of the ultimate lucky student , but the irony of that label soon becomes clear.

The cast of vivid, colourful characters includes Kiyotaka, a student famed for his unwavering moral compass, a pop star called Sayaka, a spoiled rich kid called Byakuya, and Mondo, the ultimate biker gang leader . Their brilliance in their respective fields is only matched by their eccentricity. They re a deeply weird bunch, and the relationships you form with them are an important part of the game.

Inevitably, someone decides to play along with Monokuma s sick game, and someone is killed. But who was the culprit? It s up to you to find out. This is when Danganronpa turns into a murder mystery. You hunt for clues, interview people, and eventually take your case to court , with Monokuma acting as the judge. If you can prove who did it, they ll be sentenced to death; if you can t, everyone dies. No pressure.

This is where the game s title, which loosely translates as winning an argument with a bullet , begins to make sense. The clues you gather before a trial are called truth bullets , and as a character gives a statement, you have to look for the parts that don t make sense and literally shoot them down. You cycle through your evidence, represented by the cylinder of a revolver, take aim, and fire your bullet of truth. It s very silly, but the court cases are superbly tense and fast-paced.

The crimes are brilliantly constructed too. It s one of the better detective-style games I ve played, with the case slowly revealing itself until you hit that Aha! moment when the truth becomes clear. You spend so much time talking to the characters and getting to know them that, when one of them turns out to be a killer or victim, it genuinely hits you hard—even if you didn t like them all that much.

I can t say much else without getting into spoiler territory, but hopefully I ve given you some idea of why Danganronpa is such a cool game. It has a great sense of humour, fun writing, and lively characters, but is also incredibly dark. Monokuma is a deliciously evil villain, and the story is full of shock twists and turns.

Danganronpa was designed for handheld consoles, so it remains to be seen whether it s as enjoyable to play while sat in front of a PC monitor. There s a lot of reading, and you spend most of your time clicking through text. And there s every chance they ll screw up the port somehow. But these potential issues aside, I m delighted a game as weird and wonderful as this is making an appearance on PC.

Huzzah! The floodgates are open and another Japanese mind game is headed to PC. Just to remind you of your own mortality and the inexorable passage of time: Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc launched on Japanese PSPs in 2010. It meandered its way through the mobile platforms before eventually getting an English translation in 2014. In February it will make it to Steam.

Once you get over the shock of the trailer, the premise is beguiling. A bunch of students (obviously) find themselves imprisoned within their school, where a remote-controlled bear by the name of Monokuma sets them a challenge: if a student can murder a classmate and get away with it, they're free to go.

It's an investigative adventure (that sometimes strays into rhythm game), in which you quiz your 'friends' and gather evidence to bring to impromptu trials. Do you wanna play a game?

Edit: Andy pointed out that I'd included a potential spoiler, which I'm somewhat proud of given that I've never played the game. It has gone to edit heaven.