Spirit Hunters: Death Mark II is a visual novel horror game developed by Experience and published worldwide by Arksys Games. The third installment in the franchise sees Kazuo Yashiki return from the first game as you solve spiritual mysteries. While Spirit Hunters: Death Mark II is not a groundbreaking visual novel, its horror aesthetics and story twists left enough threads to weave together a competent but bland narrative.
The Mysteries of Konoehara Academy
You are called into Konoehara Academy as a Spirit Hunter because a student has gone missing. A spirit named The Departed puts up notes saying they are going to kill students at night, using another spirit’s will. Spirits are born from unresolved grudges before they died. You must find the students while resolving the grudges of spirits. All while figuring out who The Departed is and why they are wreaking havoc on the school.
Each chapter targets a new student and uses a new spirit. The game is seven chapters long, and while the opening chapters are decent tone-setters, I felt that the middle portion started to get repetitive. Hunting the spirits haunting the school distracted from investigating The Departed. Things picked up in the last couple of chapters. However, the middle part felt like a slog that did not contribute much to the story.
Along the way, characters will assist you: the headmaster, student council members, and teachers. However, fans of the original Spirt Hunters: Death Mark will be happy to see old characters return. While there are some standout characters like Ai Kashiwagi and Satoru Mashita, most of the characters are forgettable. A horror game isn’t complete without a few twists and turns. While a few moments surprised me, the lack of character depth flattened the impact of most moments.
Exploring The World Around You
The gameplay revolves around two different modes. There is exploration, where you explore Konoehara Academy and the surrounding areas. There are Suspensive Acts, where you use clues and items you gathered during exploration to fight off spirits.
Exploring turns the game from a visual novel into a 2D sidescrolling section, with the occasional first-person perspective. You can traverse with a party member while exploring different rooms to search for clues. Many of these environments are bland as you spend most of your time at the school. Leaving the school and exploring the surrounding areas opened up some creepier environments.
You will come across teeth, which can be traded for items that help you. These can range from increasing the chance of success during suspensive acts to taking reduced damage during fights. I never really felt like I needed to stop playing the game and focus on collecting these teeth to upgrade super often. However, upgrading my stats felt like forcing in RPG mechanics that don’t need to be here.
Suspensive Acts are the fight sections of the game. You have to choose the correct option to move forward in the fight. Each action costs you some amount of health, and there is a percentage chance that the action will succeed. Suspensive Acts are my favorite part of this game. These sections are significant for building tension during the fight, and due to the RNG nature of the Suspensive Act mechanics, they stressed me out. The double-edged sword of this is that there can be frustrating moments. Choosing a high success rate option and failing can get annoying after a while. I felt like I made the right choice and failed, leading to unnecessary resets.
Visually Stunning, Visually Terrifying
The game’s biggest strength is its art style. The art can be utterly disgusting at some points and stunning at other moments. While the environments you explore can be a little bland, the highs this game hits more than make up for it. For those not into blood and gore, the game allows you to turn off blood and gore, and the game’s random jump scares don’t add value to the game. The spirits are downright terrifying, especially The Departed. The art team deserves all the credit for how this game looks because, at times, it looks incredible.
Spirit Hunters: Death Mark II is a visual horror novel that delivers some stunning visuals but is an otherwise okay video game. While the story felt cliche at some moments, there were some bright spots in the 20 hours I spent with the game. While Suspensive Acts was my favorite part of the game, playing it sometimes felt frustrating because of the RNG nature. Fans of the franchise might be happy to see the original characters return. For fans of visual novels, there are better options for anyone looking for a horror visual novel game.
