《 DISCLAIMER: This review may contain SPOILERS! Read at your own risk. 》 《 DISCLAIMER PART 2: I have not read the source material. 》 •❅───✧❅✦❅✧───❅• Ratings Overview:
STORY 〚 5 / 10 〛• CHARACTERS 〚 4 / 10 〛• VISUALS 〚 6.5 / 10 〛• AUDIO 〚 7 / 10 〛• ENJOYMENT 〚 5 / 10 〛 •❅───✧❅✦❅✧───❅• img75%(https://res-4.cloudinary.com/dxmoktp1n/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto:best/shiboyugi-playing-death-games-to-put-food-on-the-table-yuki-sorimachi.gif) •❅───✧❅✦❅✧───❅• SHIBOYUGI: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table is a death game thriller series produced by Studio DEEN that was released in the Winter 2026 season. It is based on a light novel written by Ukai Yuushi. The adaptation was directed by Ueno Souta (assistant director of Sasaki and Miyano (2022) and director of Days with My Stepsister (2024)). SHIBOYUGI takes place in a world it describes as "deranged" and follows 17-year-old Yuki, a professional death game player. The show opens with Yuki awakening in a mysterious mansion dressed as a maid with five other girls. They are the participants in a death game where they must find out how to escape the mansion while navigating deadly traps and puzzles. This is Yuki's 28th game and so the story follows her as she leads these five new players in a search for the exit to win the game. Story: 5/10 It's an interesting concept. Death game shows are always fun, right? Wrong. The story leaves many major plot points completely undone. Why do these death games happen? Who is running these games? No one knows because the show doesn't even attempt to ask these questions. Maybe figuring out who's behind the immoral death games is an overdone trope. Maybe having a world where the existence of death games is just accepted is more novel. Except we'll never know because outside of the fact that there are death games and they are quite wide spread and they have agents and recruiters for it, we know nothing else about this world. The show focuses solely on Yuki and the games themselves and nothing of the external context. This lack of worldbuilding leaves much of the story feeling flat. The games themselves start out quite good. Game one is Yuki's 28th game, where six participants must navigate a booby-trapped mansion and find the exit. This is assumedly before time runs out, but the game gives no way for us or the characters to know how much time has passed. The first death is pleasantly sudden and really illustrates just how easily people are killed in the games. The second death shows just how violent the deaths can be. But in my opinion, they're not violent enough. The games have a feature where a players blood immediately turns into a strange cotton-like substance due to the presence of a preservative that interacts with the air. This also helps the players not bleed out as all wounds will immediately clot and they can survive grievous wounds like getting their legs blown off. The game's reasoning is that the people who watch (there's people who watch these things? Once again, a lack of worldbuilding makes facts like these come out of left field.) prefer the deaths to be less gory. Unfortunately, as the viewer, it makes many of the deaths feel silly, like watching a stuffed animal get ripped apart and not a person. Which very well may have been the point, but it dulls the tension quite a bit. The in-universe viewers may want to feel morally superior by not feeling like their watching real people die, but as a viewer of the show, I'd much prefer more gore to really solidify that this is a death game where real people die. This first game was interesting as it had so many layers. The locked door which you needed to find a key to open, being chained to a wall with descending saws and having to take turns unlocking your restraints with a singular key, the elevator with a weight limit - its all very well done. Except the final key to escaping, which felt a little too "death for deaths sake" but I'll give it a pass. Then the show decides to go out of order and jump backwards to Yuki's 10th game. The show will continue this back and forth, jumping from game 10 to game 30 to game 9 in a way that I feel detracts from the story and Yuki's developing emotions. Game 28 was a great place to start, but we then should have hopped backwards in time to maybe her first game, or the intro to game 10, before hopping back again to game 9, then finishing game 10, THEN game 30. Or at the very least, swap games 9 and 30. Additionally, the rest of the games shown were pitifully simple. Games 9 and 30 had different concepts but devolved into the same set of events: players killing players, one strong person with a protégé, Yuki kills them both and wins the game. Game 10 had a boring initial presence as the main thing was to escape dark building littered with land mines but we only come into contact with one mine the entire time. The wolf on the bottom floor felt out of place, but the voting section at the end was interesting, though how the vote ended was lackluster. I'll go more in depth with this in the next section, but much of the story focuses on Yuki's emotional state. However, it relies on a "show don't tell" format that doesn't actually show much at all. It tries to be atmospheric, but fails in many ways (more detail in the audio section). A lot of what would usually be a climactic battle are concluded off-screen as well, which dampens the excitement and makes the viewer feel cheated of something. This happens to a lesser extent in game 28, as they show Kinko's death, but not the reaction of the other players, which I feel would have been valuable. The show also forgets to follow up on the plot point of the tracker Yuki swallowed before Game 30. Game 10's battle with the wolf concluded off screen but can be forgiven by the tension created showing the other participants waiting for her arrival. Game 30, however, is the worst offender, as Yuki's final confrontation with Mishiro is pathetic and the latter's death occurs off-screen while her barely introduced protégé gets an on-screen death 2 minutes later. The death of Kyara was satisfying though. Lastly, the story relies too heavily on moments of silence and stillness. When done right, moments like those can help a theme sink in, allow the audience to absorb information or sit with a feeling the show invoked, or even create tension. SHIBOYUGI attempts to use silence and stillness in these ways but drags the moments on for far too long. Many of them had me glancing at the run time or pulling out my phone to check messages or checking to see if I accidentally paused or muted the video. It makes the episodes go by painfully slow instead of keeping the story moving and keeping the viewers attention. There was a good concept here, but it never weaves itself into a functioning narrative. Characters: 4/10 Over the show's 11 episodes, we meet a LOT of characters but we really only get to know 2 of them outside of our main character before they get killed off. Game one, Yuki's 28th game, gives us the names and base motivations/reasons for playing the game before people start dying. We get some retroactive but incredibly confusing and out of context information about Kokuto and Aoi before their deaths. We get some decent insight into Kinko before her death as well, but we get absolutely nothing on the survivors, Beniya and Momono. Game 2, Yuki's 10th game, gives us Mishiro, who will stay relevant for at least one more arc and therefore we get quite a bit on her, yet her arc is…disappointing to say the least. She's annoying, very much a narcissist. She holds a massive grudge against Yuki for being a better player than her in their first game together and she uses it as fuel to become a better player in preparation for their eventual rematch. But when the rematch comes, she does barely anything. She gives orders to other players, attacks Yuki, has a breakdown because Yuki wasn't at the top of her game, then dies off screen. I expected so much more from her with how their rivalry was sort of hyped up by the show. The other characters of Game 2 fare much the same as Game 1: Kotoha has a similar "get to know" as Kinko except she doesn't die, and we learn next to nothing about Keito and Chie before the game ends and Chie dies. Game 3, Yuki's 30th game, doesn't even bother to give us the names of any new characters except Azuma and Riko, both of which we get some basic backstory on in a single episode before they are killed. Most of the characters in Game 4, Yuki's 9th game, meet the same fate as the characters in Game 3 - no names, no introduction, killed off screen. The few characters we do meet are a mixed bag. 29-game veteran Sumiyaka is killed off screen after being introduced. Kyara's protégé Moegi is even more disappointing than Riko as Mishiro's protégé. At least Riko killed people in actual fights and caused Yuki to struggle. Moegi's only kills were other people on her team who either didn't want to fight or were sneaky kills, and she didn't even put a scratch on Yuki. The one surviving member of the Stumps doesn't even get a name if I remember correctly and only a strange backstory confession to Moegi. Kyara was a better final boss than Mishiro, though her motivations were far more simple. Hakushi, Yuki's mentor, was the most interesting character and was mentioned several times throughout the show either as flashbacks or hallucinations, but the short time we see her alive we again get very little of her. And then we have our MC, Yuki herself. She's extremely boring. She's meant to be an empty shell, but that makes her incredibly dull to watch. She's just going through the motions, following where the plot takes her. All her motivations are copied from someone else and she has no personality of her own. Her moment of weakness in her 30th game where she wasn't on the top of her game because she was nervous felt out of character. She was supposed to be silently grieving and feeling guilt for those she killed, but it felt more like she was trying to convince herself she was feeling those things instead of feeling barely anything at all. Any emotion the show tried to give her, other than her anger during the fight with Kyara, felt artificial. The Kyara fight was the only time she felt like a real person. So much of this show was meant to show her emotions as she goes about the game, but I could not get a grasp on how she felt outside of the few times she explicitly stated she was feeling something. Which for a show that relied on silence and attempted ambience and a "show don't tell" model, is not good. Also why is everyone a woman? Do no men play this game at all? Do they have a separate game for men? It just feels weird that the only men showed in this are either recruiters or background characters related to the players. Visuals: 6.5/10 Some of the art is pretty, but I dislike the disconnect between the characters and the background art. The show also has a thing where lineart is nonexistent in some shots so it's all color blocking, no details. The faces don't have eyes or other features. Its just the general shape of the face, hair, and clothing. It doesn't work great for characters like Yuki with white hair and light skin. Some frames characters mouths don't move. It's like all the art budget was saved for close up shots of the characters and their overly detailed eyes. Additionally, why are all the game outfits so…fetishy? The least concerning outfits were the Greek style dresses in Game 2. But the maid outfits? The playboy bunnies? The straight up just towels?? Really fucking weird. Audio: 7/10 The worst thing about this show's audio is the general lack of it. Too many long stretches of complete silence. Many of those scenes, especially the ones meant for ambience, could have benefited from at least SOME kind of background music, even if it was just very quiet piano or violin or something. Otherwise, the show feels empty and incomplete. Otherwise, the music that did exist in it was fine and the voice acting (Japanese) was good. Enjoyment: 5/10 Overall, this entire show had a good concept but the execution lacked many things to make it much more than an empty shell. After the first episode, watching more than 2 episodes at a time was a slog.