The Haunted Hoard: Death Mark (PS4)
Even in these less superstitious times, Japan has managed to have a fairly healthy amount of new ghost stories and novel urban folkore. Scary stories about wandering spirits who must be spoken to correctly or else you’ll immediately be killed are surprisingly common, and much like how video games routinely draw on mythology and religion for interesting creatures and confrontations, these ghostly tales are fertile ground for a horror game experience. Death Mark, also known as Spirit Hunter: Death Mark due to a later rebranding, at first seems like it is going to be about one man trying to solve a very specific personal curse, but the game’s chapters are structured more as a sequence of confronting different urban spirits.
Presenting itself as part visual novel and part point and click adventure, Death Mark involves a man turning up at a mansion with no memory of who he is and a stinging mark on the back of his hand. This mark is a curse inflicted by a spirit meant to make victims suffer until they die, draining their memory and leaving them helpless when their end comes at dawn. Assuming the name Kazuo Yashiki or a player chosen moniker, the victim receives help from a human-sized doll named Mary in understanding his situation. When more people start showing up to the mansion with their own marks, he soon becomes the driving force in eradicating the offending spirits and freeing people of their curse, all while hoping he’ll soon find the specific one who left their mark on him.
While Kazuo is a pretty boilerplate protagonist who is fit for doing whatever actions this new line of work requires of him, each chapter introduces new characters with pronounced personalities and backstories to satisfy the need for an interesting cast. While Mary is a suitably mysterious helper, having other personalities like a sketchy ex-detective, a surprisingly law-abiding street tough, a pop idol with a taste for the paranormal, and a young girl forced to mature early due to a broken home all make for partners who keep the spirit investigations interesting with their twists on how they perceive it and the personal connections they may have with the situation. The spirits are definitely the main attraction though, each chapter about investigating some urban legend that goes from the kind of straightforward scary story teenagers gossip about into deep and disturbing tales of human depravity and cruelty. This malevolent spirits are aggressive because of the awful experiences of their life, and when you do come face to face with them after learning the full breadth of their tale, you can use that knowledge to either help free them of their torment or destroy them to prevent further danger.
As the different spirits take you to somewhat limited amount of settings with the focus staying on an abandoned school and forest at night mostly, you’ll experience the story and conversations in a visual novel format where you make dialogue decisions to influence reactions and actions. For some odd reason, Death Mark presents its text with no strong indication of who is speaking. The protagonist uses one text color and basically everyone else uses another save for spirits who speak in an angry red text, but while the game does keep its amount of present characters limited, there are times where you have to use context clues to suss out which of the accompanying cast members just spoke. It does not harm how the story is told much, and the game has plenty of atmospheric backdrops, detailed character art, and high quality scene illustrations to sell the atmosphere of scouring places at night for signs of deadly ghosts. While there is no voice acting, there is some effective sound design for eerie ambience and for lending more dangerous moments a strong impact, and while there is a smattering of fairly generic jump scares when traveling between areas, there are also subtle noises that make your screen by screen traversal of a place much tenser.
The visuals are a little funky at points though. When you come fact to face with a chapter’s focus spirit, their bodies are somewhat animated despite being flat images. This can give them an uncanny quality, one helped by some of the strange designs that go for unusual proportions rather than retreading the expected routes for body horror. While it can make something like the wailing bride look almost laughable when you see her true face, there’s definitely something unsettling to the kid whose head has become so dominated by a single eye the rest is scrunched up to the side and solemn looking. Larger spirits like the bloated man surrounded by bees also manage to convey their heft pretty well with this style of animation, but there’s certainly room for improvement even when it’s not outright damaging how the hostile specters come across. A bit more articulation could probably help with their movement quality, but it might also rob a few of them of some of their otherworldliness, so it’s a hard call on which way to lean unless major design changes were to be made.
One area where the game definitely put more energy than it should have is an odd focus on detailed illustrations of young women in sexy poses despite being in mortal peril or outright dead. Of the limited illustrations the game features across its chapters, some are provocative for almost no reason save titillation, despite some being corpses or victims dressed down for no logical reason. In a game that treats itself so seriously that it even avoids comic relief almost entirely and often tries to keep a fairly dark tone during the investigations, suddenly having a woman dangling in front of you in her underwear is a shocking tone breaker. It does thankfully avoid any unfortunate images in the chapter dealing with an actual assault victim, and at parts it is more justified in showing more skin than usual such as the spirit Ms. Zoo’s exposed bra proving in no way titillating due to her body built from animal parts. You do kind of have to brush past these strange indulgences from the art team, but they are infrequent enough that most of the game continues on with a consistent scary atmosphere that matches the writing.
While much of the game is just reading conversations, evidence, and interactions, Death Mark does feature a few moments of action. As you explore areas, pick up items, and use them to open up areas in the environment or solve puzzles, you’ll sometimes be interrupted by Live or Die moments where everything you know so far must be used to answer a series of questions from malevolent spirits. These multiple choice quizzes both reveal more about the situation and test how well you’ve been paying attention, and there are some really clever ones that are more than just applying knowledge you gather. One involves you having to speak to a spirit who hates to hear the word “eye”, but your responses can also include traps like the pronoun I or words that contain a portion that sounds like eye. Sometimes you need to disobey the common knowledge of the spirit deliberately, reincorporate old advice, or be outright dishonest due to the personality of who you’re dealing with, but answering quickly is vital because dilly-dallying drains spirit power. If you run out of spirit power or answer certain questions incorrectly, you’ll die, and thankfully the game is not very punishing when it comes to death. You can often go back to a little bit before a deadly event or reload a save, and saving can happen in most areas when no conversation is going on. If you’re unprepared you can go look around more and then try again or you can just retry if you didn’t get the gimmick for the chat right, but this forgiving death system is perhaps more important for the final spirit showdowns that cap off chapters.
After you’ve gathered everything you need to find and learned what you need to know, the chapter’s main spirit will attack you and whichever person you’re exploring with at the time. These battles are about using items in conjunction properly, the outcome of your item usage determining if you get that chapter’s good or bad ending. Truly understanding the ghost’s history will let you appeal to it with items you’ve found, and while you may need to be outright violent with them even in the good outcomes, you can also choose to kill them instead if you simply want to purge them without thinking too much on the method needed to do so. Some spirits you are given both an explanation of how to kill them and how to help them reach peace, neither very straightforward and some unfortunately a little oblique. Since you need to pick your partner for the fight and there are actually some who you can’t get a good ending with, it can be a little unfortunate to keep trying all your items in the battle only to realize that you apparently didn’t get the basics right. Your tag along can also lead to failure states elsewhere, but since death isn’t too damaging, you can always try a new helper if things aren’t working, although making the trek back to the mansion to bring someone else along is a touch tedious. These are the payoff to all the buildup though, so being difficult feels an appropriate way to pay off your accumulated knowledge from the investigative work that dominates much of the experience.
THE VERDICT: An atmospheric exploration of invented Japanese ghost stories, Death Mark builds up its small batch of malevolent spirits well with effective art, detailed lore, and actual danger despite the visual novel presentation. The build up to the confrontation with a ghost involves a detailed investigation and a puzzle-like battle, and with things like the Live or Die quizzes to inject quick but forgiving moments of peril into the affair, Death Mark carries its dark and dangerous tone quite well. It does have a few questionable choices both in its presentation and spirit battles, and the central mystery of the death mark feels secondary to mostly disconnected ghost investigations, but Death Mark is still a strong Japanese horror experience that rewards you for having a good eye for details.
And so, I give Death Mark for PlayStation 4…
A GOOD rating. A few gratuitously lurid looks at ladies and some questionable ideas about how to present vital information do make a run through Death Mark a bit less consistent than it could have been, but these hiccups are far outweighed by hours of intrigue, evocative art, and the effort put into making each spirit’s situation have a detailed history that ties into your own actions as the observer. Most of the game is about learning the main ghosts and putting all of your investigative efforts to work in the dramatic confrontation, and save for the partner-picking problems, most of the time this is a true test of your ability to make sense of the game’s clues. It isn’t too obvious with what the solution will be and sometimes puts multiple ones on the table to deceive you or lure you to an easier bad ending to that chapter, but a flexible save system and revival options that let you redo the important moments means Death Mark can get away with being mean at times. Considering how many Japanese ghost stories in real life involve murder happy ghosts who strike at the first incorrectly answered question, incorporating that element feels important to adapting them to game form, but Death Mark is able to have that without feeling too unfair in its execution. The few small things like indicating who is speaking feel like they were left out for no good reason, but Death Mark does an effective job with most of its atmospheric design and writing so it’s easy to look past the stranger choices.
Death Mark’s visual novel portion presents quality visuals and writing for the horror as the action emphasizes the danger and proves to be the true payoff to all the investigative work, and seeing that Death Mark’s success lead to the birth of the Spirit Hunter series does give me hope that technical improvements, a higher budget, and learning from the small stumbles of Death Mark will make the rest of the series even more effective horror. The concept of confronting urban spirits and uncovering their pasts to face them properly certainly has legs, and Death Mark definitely does a good job with the developer’s first foray into the concept.