Deadly Trick Review

Among Us Gets a Class Trial

Deadly Trick entered Early Access on Steam on July 31, 2026, for $8.99 from solo-ish developer Finalblow Co., after a long public demo period stretching back to late 2025. Its pitch, repeated almost word for word across dozens of the 57 English-language reviews, is "Among Us meets Danganronpa": up to eight players roam a school map, one of them becomes a hidden killer called the Shadow after picking up a wandering knife, and instead of a simple accusation-and-vote round, survivors get a timed investigation phase to gather clues before a single, high-stakes Class Trial-style discussion. That framing isn't developer marketing copy that reviewers are simply repeating, it's the near-universal way players themselves describe why the game clicks, and the review score, 55 positive against just 2 negative, reflects a genuinely enthusiastic small community rather than manufactured hype.

Evidence, Not Hearsay, Is the Whole Point

What reviewers consistently praise isn't the social-deduction premise itself, which borrows openly from Among Us, but the layer Deadly Trick adds on top of it: every action gets a timestamp, players can present specific pieces of evidence during discussion, and other players can corroborate, contradict, or catch someone in a lie based on where the timeline doesn't line up. Multiple reviewers independently describe this as feeling like an actual Danganronpa trial rather than a shouting match, with one detailed review breaking down how the Mastermind role can arm a Shadow with a knife while any player can also seize one and turn killer themselves, and another calling the format the first social deduction game that "makes you feel like you're solving cases" instead of just relying on hearsay. The trade-off reviewers flag most often is that matches can collapse into a coin-flip 50/50 vote even when everyone gathers evidence properly, a structural quirk more than one reviewer notes isn't really fixable by the developers without changing the format itself.

A Small, Discord-First Community With Real Growing Pains

Because Deadly Trick is still in Early Access with a modest playerbase, several reviewers note that public matchmaking lobbies are sparse and the practical way to find a full eight-player game right now is through the game's Discord server, which multiple reviews independently describe as active, welcoming, and central to actually getting matches going. That's presented as a real limitation rather than a footnote, more than one reviewer explicitly says they hope the community grows once the game finds a wider audience, and playtime figures in the sample back up how quickly the people who do find that community get hooked: dozens of reviewers report well over 50 hours played, with several past 100. Bugs and disconnects come up regularly as an expected Early Access tax, generally described as tolerable given how responsive and communicative the developer is about fixes and roadmap updates, though one negative review singles out proximity voice chat as functionally broken, describing it as producing constant fire-detector-like noise instead of usable audio.

Character Unlocks and Balance Are the Sharpest Criticism

The most substantive recurring complaint, echoed across several otherwise glowing reviews, is that four of the game's stronger characters are locked behind a daily in-game currency grind rather than available from the start, and because each character's unique ability meaningfully changes how a match plays out, more than one reviewer specifically says this feels bad given how much abilities matter mechanically. A related, more casual complaint that shows up repeatedly in shorter reviews is a call to "nerf Luna," suggesting at least one character is currently perceived as noticeably stronger than the rest of the roster, a normal growing pain for an Early Access game still tuning its systems. Cosmetics and chat icons get a pass from reviewers as fair monetization since they don't affect gameplay, but the character-ability paywall is treated as a genuinely different category of problem that the developer would need to address for the roster to feel fair from day one. A couple of reviewers who backed the game before release note that they've watched Finalblow Co. work through this exact kind of feedback in real time, pointing to a steady stream of hotfixes and roadmap posts as evidence the team is actively listening rather than treating Early Access as a marketing label.

Rounds That Stay Short Enough to Run Again Immediately

A structural detail reviewers return to almost as often as the evidence system itself is how tightly each round is paced: matches run roughly ten to twenty minutes from the opening investigation to the single Class Trial vote, short enough that a table of eight can comfortably run several matches in an evening without any one round dragging. More than one reviewer contrasts this favorably with genre veterans that can let a single confused vote spiral into a long, repetitive back-and-forth, arguing that Deadly Trick's one-shot vote format forces every round to actually resolve instead of stalling out. That same tight pacing is part of why reviewers describe the game as easy to pick up despite a real skill ceiling around character abilities and evidence-reading, a combination several reviews single out as the reason they kept coming back for match after match rather than a single novelty session.

Verdict

Deadly Trick succeeds by taking a genre Among Us made enormous and giving it something that genre has always lacked: an actual investigation phase where evidence, timestamps, and contradictions matter more than who talks the loudest during a panicked vote. Reviewers who love Danganronpa and reviewers who love Among Us are independently landing on the same conclusion, that this hybrid earns its comparisons rather than just borrowing their names, and the sheer number of 50-plus-hour playtimes in the review sample says more about its hook than any single quote could. It's still rough in the ways Early Access games always are, a small Discord-dependent player base, the occasional disconnect, and a character-unlock system that puts real mechanical power behind a grind, but for $8.99 and a genre that hasn't seen a genuinely new idea in years, it's a strong start with a clear, achievable path to something bigger.