I feel like trivia games have become a dying breed over the past few generations of consoles: not even the You Don't Know Jack guys want much to do with general knowledge quizzes of late. I grew up with Trivia Pursuit games long before I was old enough to figure out what any of them were asking so having something like Majotori come along, which is 80% video game and anime questions, played right into my worringly small sphere of knowledge. Majotori (which is Japanese for "Witch Bird", though only the first half of that makes sense) happened to fit into what little time remaining I had this week after penning my usual door-stopper of a monthly round-up, which coincidentally was 100% video game and anime talk, so finding this in the corner of my Steam backlog felt like kismet. Or maybe just an indication that I need to expand my interests a tad. At any rate, Majotori is a trivia game that has the witch Lariat appear before those desperately wishing for something and she is prepared to grant it if they can answer her trivia questions correctly.

There's nine questions per round and each correct or incorrect answer gets tossed into a roulette, where either can determine how that round goes. That also means you can win with a single right answer or lose with a single wrong one (as happened to me twice). Success or failure will have the skit play out differently, sometimes opening up a second round with the same character dependent on their arc: if they die after the first there's no second, though if you resolve their issue first time you might miss out on a more impactful quandary to solve later. The trivia mostly pulls from games, anime, movies, and general knowledge and you can tweak the frequency of any of those four topics in the main menu if you weren't quite as confident about your K-On!s and YuYu Hakushos as you are your Legend of Zeldas and Final Fantasies. I will say the movie questions in particular are extremely finite in scope: the question writer evidently has watched a few movies, but the question pack doesn't exactly make them out to be a buff. More like someone who probably has a few hundred movies rated on their Letterboxd and will absolutely get around to more later, promise, once they've carved out some free time after all their game development work is done. It felt like almost all of them were either about Cameron, Coppola, or Spielberg movies. Anime and games get more broad but the latter are definitely on the easier side if you're already the type to be browsing Steam for a quiz game. Given that lives and happiness at are stake it's probably best that you aren't getting stumped too often and letting people down but after completing the game with 33 wins and 3 losses (and in each of those cases I still answered far more right than wrong) it's perhaps not the most challenging of its type.

Visually the game has this basic but workable papercraft cut-out artstyle that is expressive enough for the storylines it depicts without going too overboard. Something about the gormless (and usually mouthless) look of these characters plus the game's sometimes aloof sense of humor made me think of McPixel, though the gameplay is of course very different. It did make me curious to see some of the other bad endings, since the few I did see tended to be of the anticlimactic "nope, not helping, see ya" kind as Lariat bailed on these imploring souls. I did check the achievement list afterwards and there is one story that only plays out to its most successful result if you happened to throw the first round with that character and then win the second, so instances like that do make a convincing case for a retry even if I'm not entirely sure there's going to be enough quiz questions left before I start seeing too many repeats. I also got the same question about "which of these is not in South Park" but with a different wrong answer, so there was a distinct feeling that maybe the question maker needed to expand their field of knowledge a little more before putting together a large enough set for some 30+ rounds of trivia.

Majotori is a fun idea and I do like a trivia game that actually focuses on video games, seeing as it's the one arena most of its players are going to be somewhat familiar with, but given the shallowness of the knowledge base and the arbitrariness of how often you'll "lose" a round despite getting almost all the answers right it's not necessarily the best of its type out there either. The quickfire nature of the rounds and the fact that the bad endings can sometimes be as entertaining as the good does mitigate the annoyance of being denied an ideal result due to some unfortunate luck but I think the game could use something a bit extra to account for it, like having a post-game "character select" mode (in the main game you're randomly given three characters to choose from taken from a larger pool, so replaying for a missing achievement based on a specific arc is more of a pain than it needs to be) or having some kind of visual novel flowchart where you can pursue and observe all the good and bad endings you've found so far. For a cheap little trivia delivery system that doesn't take itself too seriously, though, you could certainly do a lot worse.

Rating: 3 out of 5.