I'm going to keep my review short and light on detail since the nature of this story is a mystery and its best to go into it nearly blind.

Tohyo Game is one of those "Vote or Die" horror stories, and as a result it has A LOT of cliches prone to the genre.

The main character who "just wants everyone to live" but ends up making everything worse by being "selfish", the REALLY obvious red haring who knows everything about The Game™ but refuses to share because they need to be a red haring for the story to work, and the short sighted villain who puts everything in motion.

Since the book is so character dense (something like 50 characters in 17 chapters) pretty much everyone can be boiled down to a one sentence cliche. As a result most of the cast gets very little screen time, even when the deaths got excessively graphic I found it hard to make myself care about anyone who died because I barely knew them.

Where Tohyo Game redeems itself from the MANY cliches is the speed of its story telling and the gruesome nature of both its deaths and the manner of "voting" the story keeps a pace that kept me invested and got me to finish all three books in one sitting and the author does a good job coming up with new "voting" schemes. Rather than just casting a ballot the voters are made to give up increasingly valuable things in a really neat way of upping the stakes.


For what its worth, I enjoyed Tohyo Game. Even if the story was predictable the author did a good job upping the tension by playing with the idea of what counts as a vote.