Spirit Hunter: Death Mark
You have been Marked… A strange rumor is spreading through the shadows of Tokyo's H City: a mysterious disfigurement, like a grotesque birthmark, has been appearing on the bodies of certain individuals. Anyone who receives the Mark will rapidly die of unknown, horrifying causes. Deprived of your memories, you arrive at a mansion rumored to protect the bearers of the Mark. As the doors swing open, the countdown to death has already begun… Key Features • Search and Survive! – To avoid an almost certain gruesome death at the “hands” of angry spirits, you’ll need to search your surroundings for clues to increase your odds of survival. • Ghost Busting – Sometimes the sword is more powerful than the pen. And when words fail it’s time to stand your ground. Remember the price of not holding your own is an untimely death.
Game Discussion
Steam User 5
Love the game and the artwork, cgi is amazing and voices are very on point ^^
10/10 would recommend this game to friends
Steam User 4
Never again. Great visuals, cute story and character designs, but holy guacamole, the skip function needs some serious WORK. Though it's an older game so that work will never happen. I honestly don't want to recommend it due to the skip function being so terrible, but have a play through it if you can pick it up on sale, it's definitely worth at least $10~$20. Holy moly though. I will be playing the next one (that's why I played this one -- the new one looks really good) -- but I pray to god the skip function is better than the one in this one.
Also save and load. It's not really free save and load, or even exit -- you have to wait for certain segments of the game to even exit the game. Pretty bad. But the visuals are worth it. Jut buy it if you wanna give it a try!
Steam User 2
Spirit Hunter: Death Mark is pretty interesting combination of adventure game and visual novel.
Basically you have to investigate and banish bunch of different ghosts in attempt to save your life from Death Mark that has been placed on you. Story is interesting and atmosphere is just right for a ghost story.
The game is good and if you buy in sale (like right now it is for 16€) you are definitively getting good deal.
But I have so many complains about technical side of the game!
So if you don't want to listen to my rant you can stop reading here.
Japanese developers generally suck at actual programming and porting their games to PC and it shows here as well.
The controls are confusing and unintuitive. I understand that the game was probably made for consoles and controls probably made sense there but on PC with keyboard and mouse it is just bad. I am assuming what they did was just mapped the controller buttons to keyboard and were done with it. Like why can't I turn the flashlight on and off with same button, that is such basic thing. The few buttons that were mapped to keyboard keep changing their function depending on situation and they do it in weird way that kept confusing me thru whole game.
Another thing is access to main menu and saving the game. You can save or access the menu only during investigation part of the game, during visual novel segments the menu is unavailable and you can't even quit the game. Did you just finished chapter and started new one, but suddenly you need to leave? Well sucks to be you, because you have 20 minutes visual novel segment in front of you during which you can't save or quit the game! Who thought this was good idea?!? Is it so hard make engine that will let you access the menu at any time? I don't know if this is normal on consoles but it is definitely not something you should tolerate in PC game.
Text scrolling in this game is very slow, which is kind of annoying and of course there isn't option to change the speed. It wouldn't be so bad if you could show all the text after click, but of course that is not possible here ...
Those are options every visual novel should have and if you are using VN as medium to handle story in your game then you need to include those options!
Steam page says that the game has Japanese voice acting, but this is limited to just one word here, two words there ... in fact this game pretty much lacks voice acting, except for last chapter, which was apparently a DLC originally, and that one have even have few sentences in it ...
But presence of some kind of voice acting in last chapter uncovers another problem and that is translation. You will probably notice few weird sentences here and there and tests in 4th chapter are not making much sense in english, but it is not that bad. But in last chapter the ghost thinks you are her teacher and calls you sensei (teacher), but it is stubbornly being translated as Sir. Why would the translator try to hide from you that the ghost sees you as her teacher, it is such vital information too!!!
That just makes me wonder how many miss-translations there actually are in a game. I originally wanted to rant about statues, game calls Buddha statues and they are clearly not statues of Buddha, but the sensei thing in last chapter easily topped that so i will let sleeping statues lie.
So that is it. This is good game but bad game engines triggers me easily so i needed to get this off my chest.
Steam User 1
Completed and enjoyed it apart from crashing every 15mins on the steamdeck (is meant to be verified). Had to save as often as I could so could fast forward to continue the story. Would have preferred just sticking to visual novel aspect as some of the puzzles were not great and needed a guide. Also the women characters seemed to end up in more distressing circumstances more often than the men usually with little clothing. Chapter 6 set in a red light district hotel so not one for younger players. The final battles for each chapter where well done and some really creepy artwork.
Steam User 1
So I accidentally played NG first, but as an intro to the series this was definitely a good buy! Story's good, and each of the spirit's stories were interesting! It's a very good first game to the series :))
Steam User 1
My partner and I really enjoyed this one! It's a horror visual novel in which your character is trying to figure out a mystery of some spooky and dangerous occurrences by investigating (and eventually confronting) angry spirits. Each chapter focuses on one angry spirit, and the overarching narrative is revealed across the chapters.
The gameplay was enjoyable as far as visual novels go: nothing too crazy, but very similar to games of this genre (e.g. Phoenix Wright) where you go from location to location (static backgrounds), speak with characters (a few emotive artworks overlain on top of the background), investigate each location, and make decisions to solve puzzles. If you're a fan of visual novels, you'll enjoy the gameplay.
The ambiance of the game was absolutely excellent. The artwork was really cool, and the music did an amazing job setting an eerie/creepy tone (especially Chapter 5 in my opinion). The plot is a bit confusing at first, but it gets pretty creepy, and the game slowly reveals more and more until the big finale.
I want to clarify that this is absolutely not worth the regular $50 price, but highly recommend grabbing it on sale (e.g. $15 or lower) or in a bundle. Definitely worth trying out
Steam User 1
I fell in love with this game after seeing a Let's Play of it online. Now I'm happy to finally play it myself. I've completed the first chapter so far, and the storytelling is good--it requires you to pay attention instead of skipping through text, to figure out how to best end the chapter on a good note. ^^
The battle system is interesting, although how the MC uses tools is a little strange. In the first chapter, I couldn't use a tool onto the area directly--I had to have MC look at it first, before the action succeeded. Otherwise it's a very interesting game that I love, and many people should try at least once, especially if you're a fan of supernatural stuff (though I recommend looking up warnings, as body horror is rampant in this game.) <3 all in all a one-of-a-kind game! I hope for more games to come from this game developer (I also bought Spirit Hunter: NG and can't wait to get started with that one :D)