One of the things I’ve come to really like about Experience as I play more of their games is how they can take the same basic concept and provide a completely different riff on it, rather than just taking the easy way out.
This can be seen in the dungeon crawlers they’re most famous for, which all vary in complexity, depth and unique mechanical wrinkles. But it’s also apparent in their Spirit Hunter series, which began with Death Mark and continues with the curiously named (and nigh-un-Googleable) NG.
While both games share the same idea of hunting restless spirits and either destroying them or resolving their grudges, the execution and vibe of the two games feel very different from one another. So we’re going to take a look at the latter after the jump.
Canonically, NG unfolds a couple of years after Death Mark, but it’s not necessary to have played Death Mark to enjoy NG. There are a few callbacks and references to characters and events from Death Mark, but for the most part NG’s narrative is completely separate and self-contained.
In NG, you take on the role of Akira Kijima, a high-school delinquent who has been making a bit of money on the side competing in underground yakuza fighting tournaments. Actually, “competing” doesn’t really do him justice; he’s been absolutely dominating in the competitions for some time, allowing him to live relatively comfortably in a humble little apartment.
His delinquency stems from his turbulent family life: some time before the narrative of NG begins, he lost his mother and, in the absence of his father — whose identity he doesn’t know — he is taken in by his aunt Natsumi, a horror writer who reluctantly runs a bar in order to pay the bills when the books aren’t bringing in the paycheques.
Despite running with a rough crowd — most notably the son of a local yakuza family’s head — Akira is a kind and considerate sort. He takes care of Natsumi’s daughter Ami — his adoptive sister — when Natsumi is working late, and the two enjoy a relationship that is as close as any real siblings.
As the story opens, we learn that Yuri, a high school girl Ami had struck up a friendship with, has died. While Akira didn’t know her directly, he understands how Ami wants to pay her respects, and helps her do so. However, it’s not long after this that things start to get a bit weird.
After seeing the ghost of Yuri, Akira and Ami are attacked by a phantom van with no driver, seemingly hell-bent on killing them in the same way Yuri met her end. Veterans of Death Mark will recognise this as a sure sign of a spirit with a grudge, but there’s a bit of a twist this time around.
After Akira and Ami successfully escape the phantom’s attack, they retire to Akira’s apartment to wait for Natsumi to finish her work at the bar. Ami goes into the bathroom… and disappears. Not long after, Akira hears the mysterious sound of a flute and, following it, discovers a human-sized doll that calls itself “Kakuya”, dressed in traditional Japanese garb.
Kakuya, it seems, wants to “play” with Akira, and she has taken Ami to ensure he does just that. From hereon, Akira is afflicted with a curse: beat Kakuya’s “games” — and, he hopes, rescue Ami from wherever Kakuya has spirited her away to — or die. The choice is simple.
What unfolds next is structurally similar to Death Mark. You’re presented with a core mystery to solve, positioned as one of Kakuya’s “games”. She gives an initial clue about the spirit that is at the centre of the case, then disappears. From hereon, Akira must solve the mystery and destroy or pacify the spirit before his curse kills him. Once he’s done this, another mystery presents itself, and you repeat this process several times until the inevitable final confrontation with Kakuya and the end of the game.
Each case unfolds across a few distinct phases. The initial story is told in visual novel style, with Akira usually becoming involved with a couple of potential companion characters who will help him with his investigation. In the first case, this is his yakuza friend Amanome and a girl named Hazuki, who is obsessed with the occult. In later cases, Akira teams up with a journalist named Ban, a magician named Rosé and a detective named Ooe.
Once the basics of the case are established, you’ll pay your first visit to the core location of the case to investigate. These sequences unfold from a first-person perspective and allow you to use Akira’s torch (or an “eye” icon in scenes that are already well-lit) to search for hotspots and investigate them. Like in Death Mark, Akira can bring one companion with him at any one time; the other is left standing watch, because the key location is inevitably somewhere that high school kids shouldn’t be seen sneaking into at night.
One nice change from Death Mark is that movement has abandoned the idea of “facing”. In Death Mark, you’d move relative to the direction the character was facing, indicated on a map in the corner of the screen; in NG, meanwhile, you simply move north, south, east or west from your current location. There are no situations where you might see the same location from different directions; in effect, it’s taking a more traditional “adventure game” approach, rather than the quasi-dungeon crawler approach Death Mark did, and it’s a change for the better.
In fact, NG in general feels very much like you’re playing an old-school text adventure at times. Use of voice acting is minimal, with the game instead adopting a “sound novel” approach by making very strong and atmospheric use of ambient sound and occasional, rather than continuous, music. Because there’s very little voice acting, much of the game requires you to read the text carefully — be it Akira’s “narration” of the scene, or the dialogue between characters. Even the smallest details can sometimes become very relevant later in a case.
When investigating environments, some hotspots will just prompt a short description when clicked, but others will bring up an additional interface that allows Akira to examine the object or scenery more closely, use an item from his inventory on it or, after he awakens to a mysterious power known as “Bloodmetry” early in the game, view flashbacks of the past by touching bloodstains.
At times, Akira and partner will encounter dangerous situations where you have to make a decision quickly. These are known as “Crisis Choices”, and are similar to the “Deadly Choices” in Death Mark. When a Crisis Choice comes up, you’re given up to three possible actions or dialogue options to choose from, and you must pick one before a “Security” meter, which starts at 1,000 points, ticks down to zero. Choosing incorrectly will either drain all your Security immediately, which will result in death or incarceration depending on the situation, or drain some of it, which allows you to continue if you make correct decisions on subsequent Crisis Choices in an encounter.
Security replenishes after each Crisis Choice encounter, which may consist of several sets of options in succession. To counterbalance this, there’s no means of increasing it above its initial maximum like how you could in Death Mark by finding worn-out talismans. And for the most part, choosing wrongly results in an immediate Game Over — though you can retry from just before the Crisis Choice, allowing you to eventually pick the right one by process of elimination — so the Security meter is mostly there to add a bit of pressure and force you to make a quick decision rather than agonising over it.
As you progress through each case in NG, Akira’s curse will advance, being depicted as a series of increasingly bloody mouths popping up all over his body and screeching something vaguely related to the case. Naturally, only Akira can see this, making him talking about it to others a key indicator of him trusting them.
The curse is positioned narratively as a “time limit” of sorts — however, in the same way that Death Mark protagonist Yashiki’s mark would start to “burn” the closer to death he supposedly was, there is no actual time limit in place. The curse becoming more severe, as with the Mark “burning”, is more of an indication that you’re making noteworthy progress through the case; one might argue being aware of this takes some of the tension away somewhat, but it’s preferable to having to solve all the game’s challenges against the clock. Suspension of disbelief and all that.
When the curse reaches its most severe, the mouths will scream that “the tale has reached Happily Ever After…”. Narratively, this means Akira is almost out of time to win Kakuya’s current “game”; in practice, it means you will very shortly be confronting the main spirit of the case.
Confronting a spirit in NG is a little different from its predecessor. Rather than unfolding as a turn-based battle, you are instead thrown into what the game calls a “Survival Escape” scenario; in narrative terms, this represents Akira using his heightened senses he has developed using his martial arts training to “slow time” while he considers what to do next. What occurs next is a life-or-death situation in which you must use the correct inventory object on the appropriate item in the location you’re in. Succeed, and you progress to the next “Scene” in the Survival Escape sequence; fail and you die — though like the Crisis Choices, you can retry from just before the encounter started.
As the Final Scene in each Survival Escape situation, you have the choice of performing an action that will destroy the spirit but cause its grudge to kill your companion, or do something else that will satisfy its grudge, pacify it and allow it to move on to the next life with no regrets.
Generally speaking, the “destroy” option is more obvious and easy — it involves abusing the spirit in some way, either violently or emotionally — while the “pacify” option requires you to look back over the notes Akira automatically makes during each case, as well as the detailed item descriptions in the inventory. Thankfully, you can refer to both of these in the middle of a Survival Escape scenario.
For the most part, the solutions to NG’s various puzzles are straightforward if you think about them logically and remember the information you have learned over the course of the case — though saying this, do bear in mind I am someone who grew up with adventure games and have thus been brain-poisoned by some of the most ridiculous moon logic ever committed to code — and I didn’t find myself needing to reach for a walkthrough at any point.
The game does like to mess with you now and again by tweaking its structure slightly, though; in one case, the difference between destroying the spirit and pacifying it comes from the action you take before the final action in the scene, which is the same regardless. Every solution makes internal sense if you stop to think about it, though, and the way you can retry if you fail means that most players will likely eventually stumble across the solution by brute force if absolutely necessary.
Narratively, NG goes to some dark places, as you might expect from a tale of ghosts with grudges. The game tones down the sexualised horror considerably from its predecessor, but otherwise doesn’t hold back on its depictions of human beings as absolutely awful, abhorrent pieces of shit who don’t deserve to exist. Over the course of the various cases, you’ll come into contact with murder, kidnapping, paedophilia, torture, corruption, extortion and all manner of other unpleasant things.
It’s particularly interesting because NG goes out of its way to make you understand that none of its characters — including the “good guys” on your team — are particularly squeaky-clean. This is a bit of a contrast to Death Mark, where a lot of the characters who ended up cursed were relative “innocents” who didn’t deserve the fate that potentially awaited them.
We’ve already seen the obvious examples of Akira being a delinquent underground fighter and his friend Amanome being the son of a yakuza head — and already very capable at taking care of “family business”. But the other characters are all a bit murky to varying degrees, too.
Hazuki is probably the most clean-cut of the characters, but her occupation means one can argue she spends most of her life lying to people and manipulating their emotions for personal gain. Ban is a journalist with a gambling addiction and a tendency to extort money from people. Rosé positions herself as a magician, but is clearly a talented and experienced thief. And Ooe is a corrupt, maverick cop more interested in satisfying her own personal vendettas than strictly sticking to the letter of the law.
One of the things you come to realise, though, is that at times life requires you to bend the rules a little bit, particularly if you’re faced with unusual and life-threatening situations. None of these characters are uncomfortable to be around; on the contrary, their obvious flaws make them likable and relatable.
The key difference between the main characters of NG and the “villains” of the piece is that our heroes are not “evil”, as such. As Akira points out at one point in the narrative, the people he becomes involved with are all “outlaws” of a sort; people who eschew the conventions and norms of society to varying degrees. And for the most part, they are all people who have specifically chosen to do that.
The spirits provide a different spin on this idea. Although explicitly presented as monstrous from both a visual and behavioural perspective, the most important thing about NG if you want to get its best ending is, like its predecessor, coming to understand these spirits and their grudges. Every single spirit you come into contact with has very good reason for hanging around after death and expressing its fury through bloody violence.
It doesn’t make what they do right by any means, but that doesn’t mean you can’t understand and empathise with their situations. In every case, they have turned to violence because they feel powerless to do anything else other than “punish” those who wronged them in life. And, indeed, given the monstrous forms they take after death, it probably is their only option, as there’s no way they will be able to fit in with society and find resolution to their woes via less bloody means.
There’s an interesting twist on this during the last major case of the game that I won’t spoil for you now; for now, it should suffice to say that when you’re dealing with the grudges of a group of people rather than an individual, it pays to consider why the different people involved might be feeling the way they do — and how the consequences of various actions you take might differ from person to person.
NG is, like its predecessor, a thoroughly compelling twist on Japanese ghost stories and urban legends. The key difference between the two games is in overall vibe. While Death Mark was pretty consistently a bleak struggle for survival while dealing with the challenges of not knowing your own identity, NG, on the whole, feels a lot more upbeat.
This is partly down to its striking “punk”-style interface, which the cynical might suggest is cribbed almost wholesale from Atlus’ 2016 classic Persona 5. But, given that game also dealt with characters who existed outside the conventional “norms” of everyday life, one might argue that it’s an entirely appropriate game to borrow an aesthetic from.
Perhaps more significant to what we are talking about today, though, is the tone of the narrative. Although Akira is facing a similar situation to Yashiki from Death Mark, he is in full command of his faculties and knows exactly who he is. Moreover, he is surrounded by people who support him because they want to, rather than because they are obliged to.
This ties in with the “outlaw” theme; these are people who are specifically making a choice to eschew what most folks would call “common sense” and believe in the supernatural. To put it another way, no-one else in NG is forced into investigating the cases because they, too, are cursed — though this, of course, doesn’t mean that everyone will escape unharmed, either.
Notably, there’s a point partway through the game where you have to choose between two characters in a dangerous situation. The one you don’t choose doesn’t die, but circumstances dictate that they will take no further active roles in the story from thereon. There are also several other secondary characters who get a pretty raw deal in the grand scheme of things — but again, they ended up in the situations they were in because they chose to do so, not because they were forced into it.
NG is a really enjoyable follow-up to Death Mark. It would have been easy for Experience to just do “the further adventures of Yashiki and friends” and just keep all the elements of the original with a different story, but the different vibe and aesthetic along with the subtle tweaks and refinements to the mechanical elements make it feel like a distinct, separate game; a worthy successor rather than more of the same.
And it seems Death Mark II goes and changes things up once again. But that, as the mouths in my cheek are screaming at me, is a tale for another day…
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