Game Loop and Victory Conditions
Shinri Trial is a multiplayer social thriller with no predetermined script. The players create the story through their own choices. Each session brings together 16 students, all trying to survive and escape the Academy.
🌞 Phase 1: Daily Life
This is the main phase of the game. Students explore the Academy, build relationships, gather resources, and take care of their needs.
💓 Needs and Survival
Your character has basic needs. Ignoring them for too long applies debuffs and can eventually lead to death.
- Hunger: Restored by eating food.
- Alertness: Restored by sleeping in your own bed or using stimulants such as coffee and energy drinks.
🛠 Crafting and Economy
Resources are scattered throughout the Academy and can be processed at specialized stations:
- Technical Workbench: Craft gadgets, traps, and weapons.
- Medical Workbench: Craft first-aid kits, bandages, poisons, and sleeping agents.
- Kitchen Stove: Prepare advanced meals that provide buffs.
- Vending Machine: Purchase basic food.
- MonoShop: Purchase rare items that can help you win—or eliminate another player.
🔑 Personal Storage and Discarded Items
- Personal Safe: Located inside your room. Its reinforced lock is more difficult to pick than ordinary locks.
- Incinerator: Items dropped on the floor anywhere in the Academy will eventually be moved to the shared waste containers inside the incinerator. Items stored inside containers such as cabinets are not collected as waste.
🔪 Phase 2: The Crime
At any point, a player may choose to become the Blackened by eliminating another character.
Methods of Elimination
- Melee Weapons: Blunt, bladed, and hybrid weapons such as hammers, knives, and shovels.
- Traps: Bear traps and tripwires.
- Special Tools: Poisons and sleeping medicine.
- The Environment: Push a victim from a height, lock them in a freezer or sauna, or crush them using environmental machinery and objects such as elevators, curtains, or gates.
- Attrition: Restrain a victim with handcuffs or cable ties and leave them without food or sleep.
💀 Elimination Rules
- A player may eliminate no more than two characters during a single chapter.
- If a player eliminates their own character, they leave the match and receive no experience points (XP).
Discovering a Body
A body is considered discovered after at least three different characters have seen it. If nobody finds the body within five minutes, the system triggers an automatic announcement.
🔍 Phase 3: Investigation
The investigation begins as soon as the body-discovery announcement plays. Combat is disabled for the duration of this phase.
⏱ Investigation Timer
- Dynamic Duration: The investigation period becomes longer with each new chapter.
- Early Trial: The surviving players can begin the Trial before the timer expires if a majority gathers near the Red Doors—the entrance to the Trial elevator.
💀 Examining the Body
Interacting with the body provides an Elimination Report containing:
- the victim’s name;
- the approximate time of elimination, accurate to within one minute of real time;
- a list of injuries and special markings.
🩸 Evidence
- Evidence Beneath the Body: Clues appear underneath the victim and can reveal whether the body was moved.
- Fingerprints: Fingerprints can only be seen and collected with a UV flashlight. Gloves and disguises leave Unidentified Fingerprints.
- Bloody Hands: After striking someone with a weapon, the Culprit’s hands leave bloody fingerprints. Everyone can see them, but they can only be collected as evidence with a UV flashlight.
- Environmental Evidence: Scorch marks from explosions, triggered traps, and empty poison vials can all reveal how a crime was committed.
🧹 Cleaning and Concealing Evidence
- Cloth: Removes blood and fingerprints from items and weapons.
- Mop: Cleans blood pools from floors, fingerprints from walls, and other environmental evidence.
- Sinks: Remove the dirty-hands effect.
⚖️ Phase 4: Trial of Truth (Shinri Trial)
The climax of each chapter. The Trial lasts 15 minutes in real time.
🔋 Energy and Actions
Every player has a limited supply of Energy that can be spent on the following actions:
- Initiate Voting: Advance the Trial to the Culprit-selection stage.
- Challenge to a Debate: Begin a one-on-one debate.
- Interrupt: Force the camera to focus on you while lowering the volume of everyone else.
- Agree: Display an agreement animation in the interface.
🎙 Camera Focus and Arguments
- Focus: The camera follows the player currently holding the voice-chat button. Other speakers are placed in a queue.
- Presenting Evidence: Players can show the entire group collected evidence or items from their inventory, including each item’s current condition.
⚔️ Special Debate Mechanics
- Cross Debate: A duel between two players. Everyone else is muted, but may post Noise—pink chat messages that obstruct the debaters’ view. The winner restores Energy.
- Scrum Debate: Triggered when Voting ends in a tie. Players split into teams for a battle of arguments.
- If the vote ends in a tie twice in a row, the Culprit wins automatically and everyone else loses.
🏆 Victory Conditions
Your ending depends on your playstyle, moral choices, and ability to make difficult decisions.
🔪 Culprit Victory
A path built on treachery, composure, and deception.
- Eliminate another player.
- Survive the investigation without exposing yourself.
- Mislead the other students during the Trial so they vote for an innocent player.
Outcome: The Culprit escapes to freedom. Everyone else loses.
🌱 Peaceful Victory and the Final Quest
The most difficult and dramatic path—a test of both teamwork and humanity.
To unlock this ending, the students must reject the Mastermind’s motive, complete quests, restore the Academy’s life-support systems, and reach the Evacuation Room on the fourth floor.
💀 Final Quest: “The Choice of Peace”
As soon as the Control Room doors open, the final timer begins and the rules of the game change completely.
1. Academy Rules Are Suspended
- There are no longer any penalties for dealing damage.
- Eliminating another character no longer triggers a Trial.
- Players may freely eliminate one another to reduce the competition for evacuation slots.
2. Limited Evacuation Capacity
Not everyone can escape the Academy. The number of available evacuation slots is calculated as follows:
55% of the players who are currently alive, with a maximum of eight slots.
For example, if 10 players remain alive, only five or six will be able to evacuate.
3. Decision and Evacuation Phases
- Decision Phase: The evacuation pods remain locked at first. Players must decide—through negotiation or force—who deserves to survive.
- Evacuation Phase: When the timer expires, the pods unlock. Players must enter a pod in time to claim an evacuation slot.
4. Failure Conditions
- Too Few Survivors: If the number of living players falls below the number of active pods during the confrontation, the system considers this mission as a failure and every remaining player loses.
- Timeout: If the players fail to enter the pods before the timer expires, everyone loses.
Outcome: The players who secure a pod escape the simulation. Anyone left behind remains in the Academy forever and loses.
🕊 Survivor Victory
A path of patience—or the complete elimination of every rival.
If only two students remain alive after Murders and Trials:
- the game ends;
- the Academy’s rules are suspended;
- the Academy doors open automatically with no additional requirements.
Outcome: The final two students survive, proving that their will to live cannot be broken.
☠ Defeat
Your character’s story ends if:
- you are eliminated during the game or the Final Quest;
- you are executed during the Trial, whether correctly identified as the Culprit or voted out by mistake;
- you fail to secure an evacuation pod during the Peaceful Victory ending.