Day 42 - Harakiri - Slot Review

On day 42, I took on Harakiri by Colorful Play, a 6x5 cluster pays slot with 96.11% RTP and a max win of 20,000x, released this year.

The theme is meant to be a dark samurai one, with a blood splattered logo, a scary masked samurai and a full moon over a Japanese shrine. But the game itself feels the opposite: the music is calm, the colors are soft, and the cherry blossoms make it a light and relaxing slot, so it’s not what you expect from the character on the logo. You win by matching 5 or more symbols that touch each other horizontally or vertically. The high symbols are the samurai helmet, the shuriken, the katana and the sake bottle, and the low ones are four cherry blossoms in pink, blue, green and yellow. The helmet is the top payer, with 30x for a cluster of 20 or more, and the shuriken follows with 25x. The katana and the sake bottle pay 15x, and the blossoms pay 7.5x for the same cluster size.

The Wild is a stone block with a golden X. It can land on any reel and substitutes for every symbol except the Scatter, and every Wild reveals a random multiplier when it lands: 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 6x, 8x, 10x, 15x, 20x, 25x, 30x or 50x.

The Scatter is a bloody moon with the FS letters, and it can land on all reels. Land 3, 4 or 5 Scatters anywhere to trigger one of three bonuses, each with 10 free spins and sticky Wilds that stay on the grid for the whole round:

3 Scatters trigger the Bonus, where the Wild multipliers can be 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 6x, 8x, 10x, 15x, 20x, 25x, 30x or 50x. 4 Scatters trigger the Super Bonus, where the lowest multipliers are removed, so they start at 4x and go up to 50x. 5 Scatters trigger the Epic Bonus, where the Wild multipliers are only 10x, 15x, 20x, 25x, 30x or 50x.

During the free spins, landing 2, 3, 4 or 5 Scatters gives you an extra 3, 5, 8 or 10 spins. The max win is capped at 20,000x, and if you hit it in a free game round, the round ends immediately, you get paid and any spins left are forfeited.

Plan for winning: you want Wilds with big multipliers to land inside clusters, and in the bonus you want as many of them as possible on the grid, so the multipliers build up through the round because they’re sticky.

My session was a loss. I triggered a 3 Scatter bonus on my 5th spin, and it paid 75x. That was the one and only highlight of the day.

The bonus hit rate is very low. The mechanics aren’t anything unique, as it’s a sticky Wild multiplier game, and with a low bonus hit ratio the base game gets boring. The theme didn’t work for me either. The name and the bloody samurai logo promise something dark and intense, but the game itself is a light and relaxing one, and that’s not what you expect from that character.

This was the first game I tried from this studio, so I’ll try a few of their other newer titles. For this one, it’s NOT APPROVED.