SHIBOYUGI: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table – Episode 1

Content Warning: attempted suicide, bloodless dismemberment

What’s it about? A group of girls wake in a strange mansion, where they must find a way to escape without falling prey to deadly traps. Some are there to pay off a debt, others from trickery—but no one is as veteran as Yuki, who has vowed to complete 99 death games for reasons unknown.

I can’t say I’ve ever found myself wondering, “what if A24 released a death game title?” but someone must have, because SHIBOYUGI exists. It checks all the boxes: it’s visually inventive, vaguely edgy, kinda clever but not as much as it thinks it is, and I can see it being referred to as an “elevated” version of the genre by people who don’t normally engage with it. SHIBOYUGI’s double-length first episode doesn’t even make for a bad short film, but I have serious doubts about its staying power as an entire series.

The thing about death game stories is that the concept runs out of juice fast. The most successful instances were either early titles that basically never stop escalating (Battle Royale, The Future Diary), or they use the “death game” as a jumping off point to explore other issues (Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show, which is highly underrated). But most of the time, the audience goes numb to the sense of danger and stops investing in the characters long before the story hits the finish line.

SHIBOYUGI really earns its long runtime in that respect, playing out the whole emotional arc from start to finish over a small enough time period that you feel intrigued but not exhausted. The girls are all pretty thinly sketched, but only one of them is interminably irritating, which I count as a win. The real star here is the visuals, which are chasing that Monogatari cred as fast as their little stockinged legs can carry them. I’m a sucker for lineless animation, and it looks awfully nice when deployed next to the overstuffed baroque trappings of the Resident Evil mansion they’re in. The live-action cut-ins stray closer to feeling pretentious—the point is clearly that we’re meant to be part of the audience that Yuki refers to (DO YOU SEE), but I guess I’m less inclined to accept the show’s admonishment when it’s the one with a POV suicide attempt for a cold open.

It’s the kind of bluntness that I find on the one hand charming, and on the other hand disingenuous. There’s no blood in this—any injuries spray a cotton fluff solution that apparently allow limbs to be re-attached later, because “people are watching”—and no fan service shots, even though the contestants were all implicitly redressed in maid costumes while unconscious. Death game stories go hand-in-hand with exploitation, particularly misogynistic and sexualized violence, and I appreciate an entry that side-steps those things. But part of me, a little galled by the preemptive finger-wagging on the script’s part, can’t help but respond, “you know you are still showing me a movie’s worth of teenage girls in fetish outfits being dismembered and having terrified breakdowns in extreme detail.”

That’s not to say I don’t like horror, but I find that the best genre explorations don’t start out swinging this self-defensively when they’ve only tweaked a couple of aesthetic elements while the core concept remains basically unchanged. It reminds me of the worse end of Yoko Taro’s ouevre, but without the bloody-minded commitment to weirdness.

I had a good time with this episode, but the ending reveal that it was game 28 out of a goal of 99 took the wind out of me. It can’t possibly plan to do things that straight-forwardly, but the idea that this might be 12 weeks of different death games shaking their heads to let me know they disapprove of my being there was conceptually exhausting. Will it do something with the class elements implied by the financial desperation at stake? Has it thought for more than the first 30 seconds about women in exploitation narratives? Too soon to say. I think I’m in for the ol’ three-episode try, but I’m not sure I’d yet recommend this unless you specifically want to check out the animation. Do go check out the lesbians over at Necronomico, though. They deserve it.