The Fall 2024 K-Comics Guide

How to Survive a Horror Game

What's It About? 

Suddenly thrust into her favorite mystery murder game, our protagonist embodies Arviche Green, a supporting character doomed to bite the dust. Compounding the chaos, she wakes up in the house of the prime suspect, Duke Leikas Learmond, as the in-house tutor to his niece and nephew! Convinced of the Duke's guilt, she juggles evading the main storyline while also uncovering the truth. With her virtual lives dwindling, can Arviche game her way out, or is a game-over fate sealed?

How to Survive a Horror Game has a story by Bammui and art by denk, with adaptation by One and English localization by Tapas Entertainment. Published by Tapas Entertainment.

Is It Worth Reading?

There's an impressive variety of games in the visual novel form, so why is it that 99% of all people reborn in a game world end up in an otome game or another form of romance? Or at least, most of the stories with an intended female audience seem to transmigrate their characters to an otome game; in the male-target sphere, the norm is an RPG. That helps How to Survive a Horror Game stand out a bit, because our heroine managed to land in a murder mystery visual novel, and she's not entirely sure she's going to survive it.

How the woman now known as Arviche Green ended up there isn't entirely clear. The last thing she remembers is playing the game, having nearly beaten it, and being almost certain that the villain is Duke Leikas. But that “almost” is important, because as she begins to figure out what's going on, it begins to look a lot like that's just what the developers wanted her to think – and that the truth is something far stranger. Or is it? There are enough little details added into Arviche's real-life experiences as a game character to make us question whether or not she's changed the outcome of the story entirely, or at least that the developers didn't have all of the information when they wrote the game. After all, it's a staple of this subgenre of isekai that once you're inside the game, it no longer operates like one.

However, if that's the case, then why is Arviche getting subquest notifications and raising stats? While this could simply be bad writing, I'm inclined to believe that such is not the case. They're more like assists to guide her along, granted to her after she failed to avert her preordained death. Once she bounces back at a save point, Arviche is able to access the game features, showing her that she's not beholden to the original plot. In fact, once she gets ahold of the casebook (by flat-out lying to a police officer), she's able to see who's now slated to die, figures out how to get her name off it and track the killer's patterns. It's an interesting use of a very familiar genre's tropes, and the fact that Leikas is also the romantic interest (emphatically not a piece of the original game) adds to the tension. It does drag a bit in places, and the art suffers some awkwardness in attempting to make Leikas' little niece and nephew cute, but the story has a lot of promise that it's largely building on, and I'm very curious to see where it goes – and if Arviche can save herself and all the other potential victims.

Nightly murders shake up the standard otome plot in this survival horror story. Reincarnated as an early victim, the mousy Arviche Green, must avoid death while raising her likeability level with as many characters as possible. Instead of “who will she choose?” it's “whodunnit?” A tense plot never fails to remind the reader that Arviche's life is always in danger, and her past-life knowledge of playing the game might not be enough to save it. Early in the first chapter of this manhwa, Arviche meets her first untimely end. Now that she's got just two pixelated hearts to go, tensions run high as the reader wonders how long she will last without losing them. An elegant, pseudo-historical setting frames this compelling multiple murder mystery.

Everyone's a suspect, but there are two handsome chief candidates for the murderous mastermind. There's a duke with a name like a keyboard smash: Leikas Learmond, and his fox- like friend Lord Lanbiel. An obvious love triangle is forming with a critical complication: Arviche strongly suspects the duke of being the culprit behind every murder in the story. She's armed with the knowledge from her past life of this twisty challenging game, which she didn't quite finish—and ironically, the more certain she becomes of the duke's culpability, the more certain I am of his innocence. His role as a potentially dangerous suitor adds spice to the story; I suspect the chief enjoyers of this manhwa also enjoy true crime stories. What makes Arviche particularly exciting to follow is that her knowledge does not make her bulletproof. She repeatedly reminds us that she has been reborn into a body with low stamina, and couldn't be expected to run from a killer. Plus, it's an uphill battle against Arviche's existing poor reputation. She can't hole up in a hiding spot and outwait the killer; she must engage in video game-like side quests to acquire valuable items and allies by increasing her likeability. Her vulnerability makes her interesting. Like in the video game Siren where you play as a child, or the first Resident Evil game long before the player character is given a machine gun, survival horror is much scarier when you aren't invincible. Even more fascinating: there's a key detail that Arviche isn't telling us about her final moments in her past life, and I'm dying to know what it is.

The chief flaw with this story is similar to other “reincarnated in an anime/book/game” genre stories: the reader hasn't read the original media, because it is fictional, so every development that the MC tells us is to be expected comes out of left field for us. It's a small nitpick in an otherwise spellbinding tale in which the stakes couldn't be higher.