The opening episode sells you on a lie: you think you're watching a clever survival game where information is power. By episode three, you realize the show is actually about what happens when ordinary people develop god complexes, and it stops pretending the rules matter. It deteriorates spectacularly in the second half, logic collapsing under its own ambition, but by then you're watching people destroy each other over diary entries, and that's enough.

Yukiteru Amano is a shy middle schooler with no friends at school, who records his daily life in a diary on his cell phone and talks to Deus Ex Machina, the god of time and space, whom he believes is imaginary. When Deus turns out to be real and drags him into a deadly competition, Yukiteru's isolated world shatters. Eleven other contestants also hold diaries that foretell the future, each with its own strengths and drawbacks. Over the next ninety days they must eliminate one another until a single survivor remains, and that winner becomes the new god. To stay alive, Yukiteru teams up with Yuno Gasai, a classmate who owns a diary of her own. The result is a tense psychological thriller that mixes horror, mystery and the supernatural into a brutal game of survival.