The following includes spoilers and plot theories about Dark Auction, the latest visual novel by IzanagiGames. The game was not played to completion, for reasons that will become apparent later, so these theories may or may not be accurate to the full game.
Reviewing a game is less a singular task, and more of an organic process. It’s the series of questions you start asking yourself the very moment you first hear about the game’s existence. As you play, new questions crop up and will (hopefully) have their own set of answers by the time the credits roll. That might sound like busywork, but for someone like me, formulating these questions and finding their answers is what draws me into critique in the first place! Fulfilling my latent, excited curiosity and putting it into words is just as fulfilling as play itself. Without that curiosity, that drive to learn and interpret what a game means to me, I never would’ve sat down to write any of my reviews in the first place.
Hearing about Dark Auction’s release didn’t just spark my curiosity: I dropped everything and snatched the game up immediately, eager to devour it as soon as I could. After all, it was written by Rika Suzuki, the same scenario writer responsible for my beloved Hotel Dusk: Room 215. That short, exciting detective tale on the Nintendo DS played a key role in fostering my love for visual novels, right alongside Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Jumping into a brand new story of hers, sight unseen, sixteen whole years after her last original work felt like a dream come true.
It didn’t take even an hour of play before I realized that this dream was more complicated than I bargained for. Unlike Rika’s most famous games, Dark Auction wrestles with a shockingly morbid subject: you’re an 18-year-old in Europe circa 1981, crashing a secret auction that turns out to be entirely focused on memorabilia surrounding Hitler (or as the game exclusively refers to him, “Dictator X”), with each participant’s life on the line. In fact, your dad is already dead by the time you come to collect him! Since no one is permitted to leave until the auction reaches its conclusion, you are coerced into taking his place, assisting the mysterious organization running the whole event and ensuring that no one else bites the bullet.
The tension is dulled thanks to the “Auctioneer,” the self-titled emcee of the event who wears an overly emotive parrot mask to maintain his anonymity. Still, this is a mystery game centered on the memories attached to paintings, gold pocket watches, even weapons owned by Hitler. That’s a veritable minefield of a premise, one where even the slightest misstep could lead to disaster. Still, I wanted to see where it would go, and whether an author I deeply admired could make it to the other side of that minefield in one piece.
Now, I’m going to do something I’ve never done in an article before: I will share some of the loose questions and thoughts swimming around my head while playing the first chapter of Dark Auction. Normally, these questions would sit unseen by everyone else, used as the building blocks for a coherent, polished review. But as you’ve likely gathered by now, this isn’t a review. Instead, this will give you an idea for where my head was at and what I still wanted to pursue, until everything came to a screeching halt.
- Why do they stick to “Dictator X” when terms like “Reichglyph” feel like they give the game away? Feels silly to dance around the name when everything else around Dictator X makes it obvious.
- This rich aristocrat kid (Christolph) gives off bad vibes. You never want to hear the words “my friend Adolf” in an auction about Hitler, even if he’s setting up a gag like “Yeah, my friend Adolf Zittler! Who did you think I was talking about?”
- As expected from someone who wrote Hotel Dusk and Last Window, this game really luxuriates in depicting each breakfast these characters eat. I’d kill for my own eggs benedict right about now.
- This has a sci-fi focus on “DNA memory.” Similar to Assassin’s Creed but instead of playing it, the memories get projected like a film reel. Interesting!
- These puzzles are WAY too easy, especially for something with life-or-death stakes. It’s practically spoon-feeding me the answers. Hopefully it gets more complicated later?
- I’m questioning the decision to have Hitler give this guy’s dad words of encouragement that changed his life for the better. You could give a moment like that to literally anyone else other than Hitler.
- Wait wait wait…this is a game about a shady organization extracting memories through DNA ties. The protagonist’s dad only had memories extracted, without filling in the DNA film from someone else. The dad was here to retrieve a leather-bound journal, which he said would “explain everything” to the protagonist in a flashback. I’m not playing Hitler’s secret love child, am I?
- “Hell,” the mysterious librarian who was working here in the 1940s, just said “[Protagonist’s] gait is just like…his.” Oh no. Are they actually doing this? Please tell me they aren’t actually doing this.
- If I find out that I’m Hitler’s love child, and I somehow sleuthed this shit out in Chapter 1 of a 7-8 chapter game, I’m going to be so mad
- Wait. 1981 minus 1945 equals 36, but he’s 18…does that mean he’s a clone instead?
- How would they even land a twist like that? What the fuck is happening??
As you can see, my train of thought took a turn when I started digging deeper into the game. But that only made me more determined to see it through to the end. I needed to know whether any of my deductions were on the money, and more importantly, why this storied visual novel author chose now, of all times, to write and release a violent mystery surrounding one of history’s greatest monsters. Was it building up to a message about processing the horrors of the past so the next generation could build a brighter future? Would there be a few more baffling surprises waiting for me as the rest of the game unfolded?
At the very moment when my curiosity peaked, a statement from the development team brought the whole thing crashing down:
We are truly sorry that the experience was disrupted for you after encountering AI-assisted imagery.
GOD dammit.
While wandering the estate’s corridors, there were moments when the fine art adorning each guest’s walls looked… off. A college graduation painting in particular stood out to me: it resembled a photo with a posterization effect applied, and at least two of the graduates were nearly identical in appearance. But this was a visual novel built on a limited budget, and over the years, I’ve seen plenty of rushed in-game art where the telltale signs of a Photoshop edit were hard to miss. At that time, there was no AI Generated Content Disclosure on its Steam page, and as I’ve written before, I’m done playing AI detective. I am incapable of deducing whether something weird-looking in a video game is the result of AI, a flub on the artist’s part, or a purposeful decision meant to make everything feel uncanny.
IzanagiGames has since amended the Steam page to include an AI disclosure, along with a promise that they’re “progressively replacing, wherever possible, the items whose final implementation closely reflects AI-assisted inspiration.” It’s important to look at their wording and understand they’re not erasing all of the AI art: both “wherever possible” and “whose final implementation closely reflects AI-assisted inspiration” do their own heavy lifting, implying that there are cases where replacing the art would not be possible, and that if certain pieces look good enough, they’ll probably stay in the game.
As I processed their statement, I felt a pit open in my stomach. I’d spent $31 of my own money, devoted close to six hours (which may not be a lot for a video game, but is almost one full work day), and more importantly, invested myself as a critic in this game. I still had countless questions swirling in my head, split between mundane thoughts like “Are they going to give us harder puzzles soon?” and more alarming topics like “Are they treating their subject with the severity it deserves?”
I’ve killed plenty of my own articles before. Sometimes, I just don’t have as much to say about a new game as I expected, and my thoughts can be summed up entirely in a single Bluesky post. On other occasions, what few questions I have are answered before the credits roll, and an overall lack of interest means it simply falls by the wayside. But this? Dropping a game cold turkey because the developer and publisher weren’t totally honest about the tools they used to make it, right as I’m dying to find my own answers for all of these burning questions? This is a new feeling for me. And it’s miserable.
Why would IzanagiGames use GenAI in a VN where fine art plays such a key role, from emphasizing “Dictator X’s” wartime looting to hinting at the other guests’ backstories? They went out of their way to collaborate with an accomplished author like Rika Suzuki for the plot, along with a talented manga artist like Kohske for the character designs and portraits. Apparently they were both worth the expense, but producing unique art for the investigation segments, where the player would be expected to scrutinize each individual image for a deeper meaning, was a bridge too far.
I still stand by the guidelines I wrote for myself back in December, but less than two months later, it feels as if they were written with a degree of naivety. Back then, I assumed that GenAI use wouldn’t be much of a problem outside of the AAA sphere in 2026, and if an indie or mid-tier GenAI game caught me by surprise, it would be easier to drop it and move on with my life. Even after the Stasis: Bone Totem incident, I couldn’t conceive of a reality where the destructive technology would appear in something that already had me hooked, involving a writer that played such a vital role in my own, critical development. The Jennifer that wrote these guidelines a short while ago was completely unprepared for Dark Auction.
I don’t hold my reaction against Rika Suzuki, for I’m all but certain that a scenario writer has little to no control over how the assets in the rest of the game are created. I will not extend the same grace to IzanagiGames, who seemed content to leave the GenAI art in the game as-is, without so much as a disclaimer, until they were caught. The attempted deceit is even worse than the use of a destructive technology: it’s eroded my trust in the team, their ability to build a compelling mystery VN around such a loaded topic, and the medium itself.
My time might be over with Dark Auction, but I won’t shake its impact any time soon. Like losing my place in a fascinating book halfway through reading it, I feel utterly lost, left with questions both mundane and severe that will never be answered. When I sat down to play the game, I gave the developers my money, my time, and my implicit trust that everything in the game was made by a person. I can recover the money, and there’s still plenty of time for me to cover other games. But trust is a difficult thing to replace, and I don’t know how many more Dark Auctions I can handle before suspicion takes its place.
