Death Mark a supernatural point & click, visual novel sort of game full of spooks, horrors & death… a fair amount of it. Explore in & about H City with the custom named protagonist & his merry band of Mark Bearers in an effort to understand & remove the titular Death Mark lest they suffer violent & gruesome deaths come sunrise.
In Death Mark, gameplay consists of a mixture of visual novel sections in which plot is presented & choices are to be made, both the trivial & life-or-death variety. The 2nd aspect is exploration, presented in a 1st Person DRPG-like fashion, in which you will be solving your basic point & click puzzles & combat. In the novel sections, for the most part they are your par to the course affairs of basic reading & the occasional choices. Some of these choices though, Live or die, are appropriately named. These run on a timer represented by your ‘Soul’, run out & it is Game Over. Of course, at times some choices are instant kills other times they just drain a large portion of your ‘Soul’. I loved this aspect, it gave you a large sense of urgency that enhanced the game’s atmosphere. In 1 chapter I did find it annoying as I felt that the answers given to choose from where not properly localized from the original Japanese as they made no sense in the context of the “question”. Ultimately, I could just be an idiot that missed something. In any case, failure is trivial as during exploration you will either find talismans which restore or extend your ‘Soul’ , make use of the liberal saves or the very forgiving checkpoint. Though I certainly recommend dying a few times, as some deaths scenes are certainly as chilling as the rest of the game & the sound usage helps.
Exploration, here you will be able to go about doing the point & click aspects; puzzle solving, learning & expanding lore, gathering clues to both the big picture & your current predicament, etc. Each area you visit ranging from an elementary school to a forest is akin to a “dungeon” in layout to typical DRPGs. Top right corner will show you your current room & within each you will often use your flashlight to view & interact with the environment, be it for flavor text, puzzles, gathering useful items, etc. In here is where most if not all ‘Live or die’ situations will take place, so make use the save feature.
Once said & done & you’ve found your end goal… or it found you, combat will start. It is a turn-based thing but outside of that it is nothing like an RPG meaning no HP bars or anything fancy like that, just your wits & ever encroaching death. This aspect will test what you’ve learned in your searching about & usage of the items you’ve gathered. Each turn your partner & you each get 1 action with which to use the myriad of items you’ve found meanwhile your death gets ever closer. Some items may be effective, others are not & some items when used at the same time will do something that each individually would not. Combat is puzzle solving in of itself. Ultimately your choices in combat will affect the game, but it a simple Game Over at which point you get your choice of retrying or something far more sinister.
My biggest annoyance with this portion of the game is the general uselessness of choosing your partner as generally the game goes for the “generic” route gives the appropriate reaction using whomever you have at hand. Another bigger aspect is that there are Stats that are shown on the pause screen like an RPG but have little usage outside of save 1 scenario in the game & in of itself it is a single stat of the 5 shown. All in all, partners are there for fluff, much like the Stats screen. Connecting to them is hard to do as they are removed as soon as the chapter is done, for plot reasons, & generally do not contribute anything meaningful as a whole.
The plot, as mentioned, follows you & a group of unfortunate people that have been afflicted by this strange mark & your collective effort to survive… or die. The game is divided into 6 chapters, each with its own incident & characters that fit into the bigger mystery & I might add that the 6th chapter is DLC but technically only for the Vita version of the game (Switch & PS4 copies already have it as a package), any case it is an extra chapter with little bearing to the main plot but played at the end nonetheless. Each chapter can take about 1-2 hours depending on your speed, though chapter 3 might be the shortest as it does not involve any trekking through questionable spooky areas. The plot is overall enjoyable, maybe nothing groundbreaking & I sure wished the extra characters were actually interactable so as actually give a damn about whether they live or die but thems the breaks. Also this is a game best experience as blind as possible so I am using this as a cop-out as means to mask my overall vagueness… & laziness.
Artwise the game is pretty to look at, if dark, gloomy & gory can be considered “pretty”. It is what it is & it works with the rest of the game. Word of warning, there are a few scenes involving women, revealing clothing & well, death & gore that might not be for all though I do not blame you for feeling sick at a specific chapter 2 scene… Thanks Experience Inc ( ;_; ). Any case, the excellent usage of sound involving ambient noise was phenomenal & really tied the whole spooky atmosphere. Something as simple as hearing the changing echoes of your footsteps when walking up a flight of stairs was fucking something, the wind blowing or the laughter of spooky ghost children all wound up my nerves more & more & then bam! A thing that normally would not be a jump scare ended up getting me. All in all high praises in sound design.
All in all, Death Mark is a pretty good game though I wouldn’t mind a sequel expanding on the partners having more of an impact & not just being fluff. It also suffers from the usual VN problem which is lack of immediate replayability, as there are only 2 endings & those depends on choices that can be made moot by usage of saves & again, the partners’ lack of anything doesn’t help. Ultimately I do recommend a playthrough though I honestly suggest playing it on the Switch or even Vita, as a decent pair of headphones & being closer to the action helps into the immersion of this damned good horror title. Yes, I recommend it.
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