In Spirit Hunter: Death Mark, you play Kazuo Yashiki (you can change your name if you wish though). Unfortunately, you have no memory of your life aside from your name. As you hear a couple of girls talking about an urban legend of some sort, you pass out. When you wake up, you’re in front of a huge mansion and there’s a weird painful scar on your arm that looks almost like a tattooed bite. This is Kujou Mansion, and its owner has the same mark. Something weird is definitely going on here and it’s not good for you as that mark is the Death Mark and anyone bearing it is fated to die.
Death Mark follows Kazuo Yashiki and several other people as they try to escape the deaths scheduled for them by the Death Mark. Unfortunately, this means facing down vicious spirits that have killed many people and freeing them from their earthly bindings. To do that, you’ll need to investigate the areas where other people have died and work with various partners to survive the onslaught of killer ghosts. Your partners have a vested interest in your survival, mostly because they also bear the mark and failure means a grisly death in the very near future.
Hunting down spirits isn’t easy, mind you, and many people before you have tried and failed. Death Mark is a visual novel and you’ll mostly be reading dialogue accompanied by static images and some particularly creepy and understated music. While there are options to travel from place to place within the haunted buildings and areas and lots to explore, there’s really only one path to follow that doesn’t lead to death. This isn’t a kinetic visual novel, but you will definitely be following a set path with minimal branching as you play. Failing to catch the clues left behind for you and provided by the rather disturbing voices in your head will result in your abrupt demise.
The focus here is on finding clues in the environment and you’ll be searching high and low for information that can help you to survive. Clues are cryptic at best and often outright strange. Ignore them at your own peril however as their guidance is necessary if you and your companion wish to avoid slaughter. While the moving parts of Death Mark feel confusing, each chapter slowly coalesces into a story that makes sense by the time the climax hits. While you’re wandering about, searching every nook and cranny will yield talismans that boost your spirit points, currency in the game that extends the timer for the combat you’ll be engaging in.
Spirit Hunter: Death Mark uses a dialogue selection system in lieu of traditional combat. You are warned that you will Live or Die based on your decisions and then given options to choose from. Your choices should be based on previously gathered information, but as you decide, your Spirit Power counts down like a timer. Run it out to zero and you’re dead. Make the wrong choices and it instantly drops by 500 points, leaving you at a crippling disadvantage. If you haven’t been hunting around for talismans, you might be even worse off and only have seconds to choose as the series of options pops up one by one in sequence. Manage to get all of the correct responses and you survive, lower on spirit power and more than a bit stressed out. Something as simple as hitting A too quickly might miss a vital clue too, leaving you floundering at just the wrong time.
In addition to timed decisions, you’ll eventually have to fight the spirits themselves as well. As you progress through each level, you’ll learn the backstories of each spirit as well. These are invariably dark and disturbing, leading to some rather disturbing body horror reminiscent of something that Junji Ito would create and some surprisingly sexualized imagery throughout each chapter, often of victims. There is no question that this is a game for older players, not kids.
Spirits are particularly nasty and have a different combat system than the main portion of the game. Throughout each area, you’ll pick up a variety of odd items and information along the way. When you encounter the spirit, you’ll have to combine those bits and bobs to convince the spirit to move on. The spirit will prompt you, and you’ll be given a chance to combine two different items as a response to their words. The right sequence will allow you to continue trying to defeat the spirit, the wrong one means death. If you paid attention to how the trauma that created each ghost, you’ll be able to choose the right combinations fairly easily and survive, otherwise you’ll have to go back and try again.
Once you’ve managed to dispel the spirit, you can return home with your partners to Kujou Mansion to regroup. We don’t want to give away everything, but there’s definitely more to the story than just rinse and repeat, so prepare for some interesting plot along the way. Spirit Hunter: Death Mark is incredibly dark and surprisingly unnerving for a game with such slow pacing and static visuals (although there are camera pans and a few shakycam moments on those images).
That atmosphere bleeds into every aspect of the game and the visuals match the dark content of the gameplay which abounds with themes of psycho-sexual abuse and suicide. These are portrayed intermittently in the visuals of the game, but by and large, most of the environments and areas you’ll visit are somewhat empty, relying on atmosphere and music to carry the game’s oppressive atmosphere. That’s not to say that the imagery isn’t dark and disturbing. It absolutely is, with abandoned schools, dark forests and cabins, and ravaged corpses popping up unexpectedly. It also carries the signature Experience art style as we’ve seen in other games such as Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi (review here). Expect dark and shadowed scenery to be the norm in Death Mark and you definitely won’t be disappointed. The sexual content is surprisingly graphic without being outright obscene, toeing the line of good taste for the sake of horror and engagement. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, but this is definitely a game intended for adult audiences.
Spirit Hunter: Death Mark wouldn’t be the game it is without its spectacular sound design however. There’s a particular artistry in the sound effects here, with quiet creaks and shifts, subtle crunches and weird buzzes that make you nervous even in an empty area. The dark visuals combined with sounds that never fully manifest and glimpses of things that disappear make for a paranoia-inducing experience that slowly ramps up as the ghosts start to react to your continued presence. In addition to the haunting sound effects, the soundtrack for Death Mark is also menacingly impactful, popping in just at the right times to toy with your emotional state and traumatize you further and fading out to leave uncomfortable silence to enhance the realism of events. All in all, this is a soundscape you’re going to want to pay close attention to. Turn on the surround, dim the lights, and prepare to have your skin crawl as you play!
This is a particularly well-designed game from the intense themes and story to the slow but compelling character development and the outstanding sound and visual design. There are still a few issues that could be improved though. Notably, saves can be few and far between depending on where you are in the story. Most visual novels have incorporated save anywhere functions at this point, but in Spirit Hunter: Death Mark, you can only save during exploration and at the mansion. With some rather long exposition, that can be a bit inconvenient from time to time, though the Switch makes up for it with its handy auto-resume function.
There’s also a minor overall design issue here. While Spirit Hunter: Death Mark does allow for some choice, the general format of each chapter is remarkably similar here, leading to a bit of repetition in the gameplay as you progress. The focus is all on story however, so this is a relatively minor issue as long as you’re engaged by the script, and most people will be. Aside from that, it can be hard to attain the good ending without guides, leaving you missing out on the final chapter of the game, only accessible after you complete the main game and manage to put all the spirits to rest rather than destroying them. As negatives go, these are pretty minor however.
There’s a lot to be said for a well-written visual novel, especially a horror one that makes the choices attainable and not wildly obfuscated like World End Syndrome, where it’s unclear what wrong moves you’ve made. In fact, there’s so much to be said for it that Experience made a new Switch exclusive DLC for Spirit Hunter: Death Mark even though the game has been out for seven years in North America and has already spawned two sequels, Spirit Hunter: NG and Spirit Hunter: Death Mark II. The new DLC is called Spirit Hunter: Death Mark Chapter 7 Kaerazu’s Amusement Park and focuses on Moe Watanabe, the young journalist initially featured in Chapter 1. This new DLC can be accessed via the title screen without completing the original game and runs $10. It follows a very similar format to previous chapters and is definitely with your time if you’re a fan of the Spirit Hunter series. It’s honestly surprising and refreshing to see a developer come back to a previous entry unexpectedly and add more content just for the sheer love of the game, so don’t hesitate to check it out!
Spirit Hunter: Death Mark is an outstanding game that has spawned a full trilogy spanning almost a decade and is still generating new DLC for fans of the series over ten years after its initial release. The content is extreme to be sure, but the script is charmingly engaging and the disturbing imagery will attract fans of Japanese horror. This is a solid game (even with a handful of translation misses) that really sucks you into its world with spectacular sound work and interesting characters right up until the very end. At $50 it isn’t the cheapest game, but you get a story that will stick with you long after you set the controller down. While the entire game will only take you about 10-15 hours excluding the new DLC, it’s an experience (pun intended) that’s well worth both your time and money.
This review is based on a digital copy of Spirit Hunter provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well in both. Spirit Hunter: Death Mark is also available for PS4 and on PC for Steam. The new DLC, Spirit Hunter: Death Mark Chapter 7 Kaerazu’s Amusement Park is exclusive to the Switch at this time and no plans have been released to port it to other platforms.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.