During today's Summer Game Fest showcase, Square Enix took the spotlight to reveal a new social deduction game, Killer Inn.
Killer Inn is a murder mystery developed by Tactics Studio, where players are divided up into two teams, lambs and wolves, then dropped into a big mansion together. The goal of the wolves is to murder all the lambs, while the lambs' goal is to discover who the wolves are to put a stop to their murder spree, as no one knows at the start who their other teammates are.
Players explore the mansion, collecting survival tools, gear, and weapons from chests and merchants scattered throughout. Tokens can be collected from quest completion and spent to unlock certain chests for better gear. There are over 20 different characters to choose from, all with different abilities that can be leveled up throughout a match, and they all can equip all sorts of different weapons from guns to knives to grenades to fend off members of the opposing team.
When a player is murdered, a clue is left on their body as to who the murderer was, which players can use to try and deduce the culprit. The clues might be hair, skin, fingerprints, blood, or clothing, all of which can help you narrow down who the wolves are. Good news, it looks like the game tracks clues for you, helping you narrow down wolves with UI markers indicating that someone is getting increasingly suspicious.
Once a lamb has identified a wolf, it's their job to dispatch them before they can kill anyone else. You'll automatically be eliminated if you kill as a lamb as another lamb, so Killer Inn encourages you not to just go on a murder spree to try and save yourself. There are also safe zones scattered around where wolves are forbidden from killing lambs, because the staff in the vicinity will immediately out their identity to other lambs. There's another win condition, too: there's a boat at the harbor the lambs can unlock and use to escape, though its dispatch is challenging.
Killer Inn is gearing up for a closed beta over Steam sometime soon, but it doesn't have a release date just yet.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
