Review by Ian Keogh

Having arrived in Borderland with two friends and made another, Arisu is the only survivor of several violent games. A person emerging from a game is guaranteed life for a certain number of days before participating is again necessary. As things stand, Arisu and his friend Usagi have one day left before they must take part again, but being trapped in a hotel with thugs rather damages their chances.

Haro Aso took quite the wild swerve midway through Volume 2, moving away from the challenge of games to the discovery of a beach hotel community where excess was the order of the day. It introduced multiple new characters while transforming Alice in Borderland from something unique into more standard action horror. There’s a recovery here, but it’s not complete.

Aso has the mysterious controller initiate a game at the hotel, setting the task of locating a murderer and burning them within a deadline of 108 minutes. There’s a large cast to be whittled down, but we’ve known so few of them and even fewer are remotely sympathetic, so even backstory interludes don’t engender any care for them. There’s considerable violence, but thankfully not explicitly shown and while the different ways Aro conceives of people attempting to discover the killer’s identity are interesting, they’re artificially prolonged in order to pull the plot into Volume 4.

The sample art has Arisu going through a long dark night of the soul, which works well here, but is diminished through repetition in later volumes.

The highlight proves to be the three ‘Four of Hearts’ chapters. These at first seem an unnecessary interruption, introducing a newcomer to Borderland, but develop into a tense life or death sequence restoring the series’ original premise of an impossible game of survival against the odds. Things aren’t progressing as they should when an interlude sequence holds the attention more than the main feature.