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The new Spirit Hunter game (Shibito Magire/Death Mark 2) looks really good.

Spirit Hunter is a series of psychological horror adventure games by Experience. To date there are two entries, Death Mark and NG, both of which I enjoyed thoroughly, but the upcoming third game is looking especially good to me. For one, I think the lead artist has really stepped up his character designs and made some subtle but notable enhancements to his style. I don't think there's a single design I dislike but these are my favorites:
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In addition to that the overall presentation has been upgraded considerably. The first two entries were 1st person point and click games with static images, the new game is a mix between side scrolling exploration and first person scenes. Props to them for actually doing frame by frame animation in a high res art style. Some aspects of the motion could be a bit more polished (like your companion character jittering slightly as he follows you) but overall it looks good and could make the game more atmospheric.

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This is also the first time in the series where it feels like Experience has an adequate amount of time and resources to fully make the game they wanted. As a developer, they're primarily known for making dungeon crawler RPGs so when developing Death Mark, they had intentions on adding RPG elements to the ADV genre. You can see remnants of that in the first game because the character profiles have stats next to them, which basically did nothing since those systems were scrapped due to time and budget restraints. But for this game they've brought back those ideas, expanding the partner mechanic so that who you bring to investigate with you can impact the outcome of life or death "suspense act" choices, the items you find, etc. Being an adventure game there's no combat, but there is some form of leveling for your character and companion. In general the systems look deeper and it feels like they're putting their all into it.

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Today I was looking over some of the media for the game that the devs have been posting on twitter and the horror imagery in the promo art really impressed me. I tend not to find many horror games very scary, but I like the aesthetic of horror. Really, the Spirit Hunter games have always been great at this, so I don't know if I'd say it's been stepped up significantly but the stuff they've been showing is as striking as ever.

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So, yeah, I'm really excited for this game. It's coming out December 1st in Japan, a localization by Aksys Games has been announced already. I'm hoping the English release will be early to mid 2023 at the latest. If you're a fan of horror or adventure games, I think this is something you should definitely keep an eye on.
 
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protonion

Member
Death Mark is amazing. It will never leave my collection and I will replay it before DM2.
The length was just right, the mystery was satisfying and there were some good scares in there.
The puzzles were mostly simple but the secondary harder solutions was a neat idea and it was bold of them to lock a lot of content behind them.

That said, NG sucked big time.
I forced myself to finish it and traded it immediately. I don't ever remember anything about it anymore.

I'm glad this is called Death Mark 2!
 
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kunonabi

Member
Still need to play the first Death Mark but I'm lazy when it comes to buying games on steam. Hopefully this doesn't get censored too.
 
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Death Mark is amazing. It will never leave my collection and I will replay it before DM2.
The length was just right, the mystery was satisfying and there were some good scares in there.
The puzzles were mostly simple but the secondary harder solutions was a neat idea and it was bold of them to lock a lot of content behind them.

That said, NG sucked big time.
I forced myself to finish it and traded it immediately. I don't ever remember anything about it anymore.

I'm glad this is called Death Mark 2!

I'm surprised you were so down on NG, I actually liked it better than the first game. Mostly because the companion characters didn't clear out as much between chapters so I felt like I got to know them better. I guess you don't remember the game, but I'm curious what you found so bad about it.
 

Impotaku

Member
saw this on amazon japan i had no idea it was part of the spirit hunter series have the other 2 i'll wait for the localization. I was half tempted to just play in japanese but i know i'd miss some stuff due my vocabulary not been extensive. In visual novels especially, would kind of ruin the story when i could only understand about 60% of whats written.
 
saw this on amazon japan i had no idea it was part of the spirit hunter series have the other 2 i'll wait for the localization. I was half tempted to just play in japanese but i know i'd miss some stuff due my vocabulary not been extensive. In visual novels especially, would kind of ruin the story when i could only understand about 60% of whats written.
Just learn the remaining 40% of Japanese in the next month. Easy.
/s
 
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