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Developer Spike Chunsoft/ Too Kyo Games Publisher Spike Chunsoft Format Switch Release Out now

Within the permanently drenched Kanai Ward, murderers go about their wicked business masked by a torrential downpour. The water level is rising and the body count with it. As amnesiac wannabe sleuth Yuma, should you fetch a mop or a magnifying glass? The prologue alone sees a death toll to rival an entire Ace Attorney. Wright would crumple at the workload; his hair wouldn’t survive the weather. But what else should we expect from Kazutaka Kodaka, creator of Danganronpa and co-founder of Too Kyo, a supergroup of Japanese mystery aficionados drawn from games, anime and literature? As setups go, ‘dare you cross wits with this lot?’ is a tantalising one.

Kodaka’s games have always been the unruly younger brother to Shu Takumi’s classier whodunnits. They give us nastier slayings, crueller antagonists and unhinged solutions, the plots pulling more from the impossiblecrime playbook of Japan’s Honkaku writers than Ace Attorney’s crimes of passion. Rain Code is never as simple as a knife to the back, as bodies seemingly teleport from one end of a train to the other or, in one of the game’s most audacious acts, are spread across four locked rooms to be solved in parallel. And when a knife in the back does finally manifest, it’s somehow plunged into a target safely enclosed behind three layers of a security vault. This is enjoyably contrived stuff and, as mystery anthologies go, one of the more consistently ingenious.