Too Kyo Games is a studio founded by Danganronpa series creator Kazutaka Kodaka and Zero Escape series creator Kotaro Uchikoshi, with several other staff who worked on the two popular series. Last year they revealed several projects including a game called Death March Club and gave some bare bones details, but now we’ve got a little more to go on.
At Tokyo Game Show they showed the opening cinematic and some gameplay footage, and you can watch that in Japanese above. It opens with a class of trapped schoolchildren being threatened by a strange cartoon character, forced to play a game that could result in their death by poison injection if they break the rules. It’s exactly what you’d expect if you crossed Danganronpa and Zero Escape, with a little Battle Royale (the movie) thrown in.
But then it cuts to a colorful bus where children are watching the above play out as a movie. Then there’s an explosion, and suddenly the kids are in an underwater amusement park of some kind, solving puzzles and jumping around in some pretty basic 2D platformer ways. But that strange cartoon character is here with them: Dun dun dah!
The platforming doesn’t seem like anything special, but the oddness of whatever’s actually going on suggests there’s more to Death March Club than jumping rats and pushing crates. We’ll have to wait until 2020, when it’s due on PC, to find out for sure.