"Die with me, Sara."
— Hallucination!Joe Tazuna, Chapter 2, Part 1
Your Turn To Die at a first glance appears to be just another Deadly Game suspense Visual Novel like Danganronpa or Zero Escape, but that very much does Nankidai's work a disservice... and vastly, vastly undercuts the sheer plethora of horrors, brutally horrific deaths, and sanity-blasting horror to be found underneath it all.
WARNING: All spoilers ahead are unmarked, as per Nightmare Fuel guidelines!
Game
- The executions, and by extension what the collars do:
- Mishima gets the most votes in the practice vote, leading to his collar's execution of burning right through his neck.
- Joe turns out to have drawn the Sacrifice Card for the Main Game and gets executed for not being voted out. His execution turns out to be a bunch of tubes that suck his blood out. Made even worse by Miley giving Sara a switch that slows it down slightly and temporarily with every press, under the promise that if she clicks it fast enough the execution will stop.
- During chapter 2-1, your choice in the Final Attraction determines whether Reko or Alice dies, and either way it's not pretty:
- If Reko dies, she gets stabbed in the stomach by Fake Reko and Fake Reko's collar explodes, finishing off both of them.
- If Alice dies, Fake Reko's head falls into his hands and its collar explodes, blowing a hole through his abdomen and killing him.
- Like in 2-1, during 2-2 your choice will determine if Kanna, Sou/Shin, or everyone except Nao and Sara dies.
- If you don't save Nao from the Sacrifice Card, her execution places a vice around her waist that slowly closes. Sara is given a Mercy Kill switch but can't bring herself to do it because of Nao's cries.
- If you decide to put Kanna on the chopping block, her collar injects Human Flower seeds into her body, which grow vines outwards. Kanna expires when the large flower at the top blooms.
- If you decide to vote for Sou/Shin, he manages to get his collar off and sprints away, running into the defense systems which mortally wound him.
- Anytime the game plays the loop_65 song… absolutely does not help that it’s the same song as the chase theme from The Witch's House.
- The start of the game shows a pair of hands slowly approaching Sara ... with that same scene happening in chapter 3-1B.... thankfully it's just Keiji but before that's revealed the player likely would be worried about what will happen to Sara in that scene.
- The minigame Sara has to play to save Gin from one of the traps, where you fend off evil masks in-between pressing down on a button. If you get attacked by the masks too many times, one zooms right up to you and the last thing you see is that creepy face.
- The hallucination that Sara experiences at the start of the second chapter in which the ghost of Joe comes into her room, which is now dripping blood, and blames her for his death and then tries to strangle her. It's complete with Joe having a disturbing Nightmare Face where his kind smile has been turned into a rictus, skull-like grin. That Nightmare Face shows up a couple more times afterwards too.
- Sou's dream sequence at the beginning of Chapter 2 Part 2, an exercise in Surreal Horror which reveals that the shadowy Sou seen at the very beginning of the game was talking to him, not the player. Not to mention the disembodied eyes showing up in the first room and the hand reaching out from under the table in the computer room; the fact that Sou never comments directly on either one arguably makes them more disturbing.
- Ranger revealing that the AI duplicates of the group are regularly updated to make them indistinguishable from the real ones, with their memories updated every six months and personalities every three years. How long have these people been under surveillance by their kidnappers?
- Gashu's suicide late in Chapter 2. The very idea that someone is so committed to doing you harm that they would take their own life to ensure you go down with them is utterly terrifying.
- Possibly the worst part is the look on Gashu's face; just before the gun goes off he flashes a very happy and very very cruel smile, because he knows exactly what his actions are about to do to the main cast.
- The first time meeting the real Sou Hiyori. Upon reaching the fourth floor, the group comes across what appears to be a graveyard. The first one Sara opens has Midori laying in it, eyes shut and not moving, much like you'd expect a corpse to. This is made eerier by the fact that it's not a clear cut CG - it's in shadow that pans up to show his face. When the other coffins appear with the dolls of the participants who didn't make it past the first trial, Sara shuts it. After checking the others, however, she comes back to Midori's coffin and decides to check again for any oddities. Like before, it has a shadow that starts at his legs before moving up to his face. This time, however, his eyes are very much open, and he reaches his hand out, not unlike the minigame with the hallucination Joe from Chapter 2-2.
- The potential deaths of Anzu and Hayasaka if the group fail to defeat their respective Obstructors. Anzu is trapped in her coffin and the Obstructor crushes her to death where the last shot we see of her is a piece of the coffin's roof smashing her face. Hayasaka, arguably, gets it worse, as books chomp on his body until he's dead...and unlike Anzu, who's body isn't shown, his mangled corpse is shown for the world to see. Doesn't help Gin's reaction to his death is heartbreaking.
- We finally meet Meister in the flesh at the banquet, and it turns out his portrait isn't just stylistic: He genuinely doesn't seem to have eyes or hair, but sharp teeth. More disturbingly, his portraits mimic the sprite of Sara's father at the end of 2-2 in the Kanna route.
- Remember how people noticed that Mai was wearing gloves in her victim video, but her Doll doesn't? Chapter 3-1b reveals why: Her hands were replaced with Midori's hands. His human hands. It gets worse: It turns out Midori gave away quite a bit of his body, so he has very few parts of him that are still "human". He reveals this by spinning his head.
- Manage to get every single doll survivor to the final game of 3-1 alive? You get to witness in horror as each one is loaded into a giant gun for a game of 'Russian Roulette' where each and every one of them occupies their coffin as in a mechanism resembling a giant, upright chamber of a gun. One-by-one, then, you have to fire the shots that get them killed, cruelly and unceremoniously having something done to them, before a giant drill-like structure pokes out of the top. You're fighting to make sure Gin doesn't get this fate. It is possible for a Sole Survivor to remain among them, but you've had to kill almost every single doll you saved to get to that point.
- While Maple is actually a very cheerful friendly person, she's also fully aware of her role as an Obstructor and, when Sara and Ranmaru steal Midori's ID card from the crevice on her back, she completely loses it. Long black scythes erupt from her back, each sharp enough to slash through metal, and she keeps flipping from enraged to sad to happy and back again. No matter if the group manages to appease her or not, she goes on a rampage until she runs out of power, and Kurumada ends up with a Torso with a View for the rest of the chapter as a result.
- Made even worse when Midori "upgrades" her. He replaces one of her arms with a chainsaw, her head with four screens, and adds a Rio Ranger, Mishima and Shin AI into the body with her. All while she's begging for the group to run and for the fighting to stop, and the Shin AI is begging for help.
- Midori reveals that, in simulations without Joe, Sara is a far colder, manipulative person who killed the other candidates, then used their deaths to rally the others to her side. Joe was put in the game to give the other candidates a chance. Midori, however, prefers Sara that way (if you look closely at one of the sprites used in that conversation, you can see that he's blushing), and gives a Nightmare Face while trying to encourage her to return to it.
- If Sou was kept alive over Kanna, since Sara has forgotten all about Joe by this point, we begin to see this side of Sara slipping through, and its effects are horrific. Ranmaru Kageyama, who remains well-intentioned if clearly attached to her on the alternative route, is convinced in a few simple words and gestures to kill for Sara's sake, taking on a permanent redesign for the rest of his time alive after revealing that, seeing her desire to win the game, he murders Reko or Alice, having planned to do the same to everyone else until it was only him and Sara left. This is what she's capable of when she's barely even thinking about manipulating and using people.
- The game overs from the attractions is a combination of nightmare fuel and a tearjerker. The deaths are ghastly and progressively get worse throughout, putting many game-overs screens to shame.
- In Dance Memory, if the remaining participant (Reko, Kanna, and Gin) fails to guess the doll's moves, Sara is pulled by each limb with ropes and gets sliced in half. While not as graphic, the hanging bodies of Sara and whoever you chose are extremely unnerving.
- Arm-wrestling is by far the most shuddering. If you fail, Sara and whoever you chose as your backup (Q-Taro, Keiji, and Alice) will have their faces squeezed by the doll. So hard that they bleed and supposedly having their faces crushed or ripped off.
- In Charge Card Battle, Sara and the other participant (Keiji, Q-Taro, Gin) gets blasted by a powerful beam, crashing into a wall, causing them to bleed immensely. What makes it even more painful is that the weaker character won't even speak, assuming they died instantaneously.Sara: "G...Gin...Hey..."
Gin: "......."
Sara: "No..no..." - In Fly Swatter, Sara will plead her life as the bug monsters beat her and the participant several times (Kanna, Nao, Gin) until their bodies lie motionless. This death is even more disturbing when you have Kanna as both of their eyes are wide open.
- In Quick Draw, Sara and the other participant (Nao, Sou, and Reko)are both pinned together to the ground by a sword after losing to the doll.
- In Shutter Spirits, Sara and her partner (Keiji, Reko, Nao) are suffocated by a mass of ghostly hands. If you have Keiji as your partner, his last words are "At least start with me!"
- If the participant (Sou, Reko, Alice) loses at Stay on the Target, both of them get eaten alive by the monster. The last crunch results in a blood splatter covering the lips and the eyes of the monster.
Manga
- In the online Manga adaptation, Kugie and Kanna's First Trial is held in the room beside Sara and Joe's, with a massive viewing window. Sara thus witnesses Kugie's death, with the two of them locking eyes as the bed ratchets upwards. Kugie can only reach helplessly towards the glass before disappearing completely into the mattress, leaving only her arm uncrushed and hanging limply.
- Mishima's death is taken up to eleven in chapter seven of the manga. As the collar activates and begins to burn his neck, we see a gruesomely detailed shot of Mishima bleeding from every orifice. The reactions of the other participants surely don't help, especially Kanna as the next page shows her sitting in her own urine as a lifeless corpse of a bloody man that she barely knew, lies next to her.
- Hallucination Joe's appearance looks even worse than the game, as aside from his twisted grin, he's now covered in blood, said blood is oozing out of both his eyes and nostrils, and he possesses Glowing Eyelights of Undeath.
