Dark Auction

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

Dark Auction is a Visual Novel released in 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch, with a Nintendo Switch 2 version due for release later this year. This game has players taking the role of Noah, a young man whose father disappears one day to attend a mysterious “auction”. After Noah follows his father to a strange castle, he discovers his father is dead and Noah and other “targets” have all been roped into participating in this place’s deadly proceedings.

I’ll be honest, Dark Auction seems to be a confused jumble of elements. It seems like it really wants to be something like the Danganronpa series, though it oddly lacks much of that series’ vicious nature, which seems like an odd thing to say in a game filled with strange occult stuff, where the threat of death is looming over the characters, and where the items those characters are “bidding” on are heirlooms once owned by Adolf Hitler (thinly-veiled here under the name “Dictator X”).

Each of the people who have been drawn to this place have some sort of personal vendetta or some other strong desire for one of these heirlooms, and in order to obtain it they must share with the shady organization hosting this “auction” a memory tied to their past and the object they’re “bidding” for. If their memory is honest and accurate, they get the item and the shady organization gets access to the memory. If not, the machine they’re using to extract the memory kills them and no one gets what they want. So right there, the organization (fronted by a parrot-headed “auctioneer”) is invested in the success of the participants, which is quite different from Danganronpa’s Monokuma.

Also, it’s here that I need to take an aside to say that this game’s creators don’t seem to understand how auctions actually work. This game depicts them as simply an exchange – the memory for the item (with players investigating the characters’ pasts to assist in retrieving the accurate memories), while auctions generally involve a competition of sorts that isn’t present here. In short, everyone only wants their own item, and it’s not like you have multiple characters trying to out-bid each other.

The absurdity and odd tone dissonance aside, there are some interesting characters in this game, and the mysteries about their pasts are a driving force pushing players to keep plowing forward through the story. Similarly, the exact nature of the castle, the shady organization, the auctioneer, and the oddly friendly librarian, Hell, are also oddities that will push players into curiosity to learn just what the heck is going on here.

The presentation here is mostly decent, though it does have its issues. The game has players wandering around the castle in 3D, and while it looks decent enough, I don’t really see the point to this since you’ll generally be told where you want to go next anyway, making the wandering feel like a bit of a waste of time. Even worse, on Nintendo Switch this leads to long and frequent loading times, and even though there’s nothing terribly taxing going on here, the framerates can suffer at times. It’s nothing that interferes with the gameplay, but it’s irritating all the same.

On the bright side of things, there’s some good anime-style character artwork, though the 3D models for these characters are pretty ugly and lifeless. And the characters are fully-voiced in Japanese, lending them a fair amount of personality. This is backed by a subdued soundtrack that heightens the “mystery” of the game.

Ultimately, while I do think there are some positive elements here like an interesting cast of characters, I think Dark Auction suffers due to exploration elements that seem largely unnecessary that pair with long loading times to mess with the pacing, and the tone often seems off too. I think Visual Novel fans may still find this interesting, but there are better options on Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Dark Auction is a Visual Novel-style game where players find themselves among a cast of characters drawn into an “auction” (that’s not really an auction) where they’re offering up their memories and possibly their lives in hopes of obtaining heirlooms once owned by Adolf Hitler that also hold strong personal value to each of them. While there are some strong characters here, the tone seems off and the pacing is dragged down by unnecessary First-Person exploration and frequent loading times. This isn’t a terrible Visual Novel, but it’s far from a great one.

Grade: C+

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