First Impression: Jake Hunter – Detective Story: Ghost Of The Dusk (3DS) ~ Norse Wolves

Wikipedia page – Nintendo.com page

I can’t hide the fact that I love adventure games that take you on a story that takes a lot of twists and turns. The Nintendo DS and 3DS introduced me to many series like Ace Attorney, Professor Layton, Zero Escape, Trace Memory and many others. So, it seems fitting that one of the latest games I add to my 3DS collection is one that fits my favorite genre perfectly. It’s the second Jake Hunter game released in the west. So, is it any good or should this series stay in Japan? Let’s find out if this game meets my high bars while I give you my honest spoiler free opinion while I invite you to leave a comment with your opinion on the content of this article and/or the game in the comment section down below. 

Norse Wolves

In this game you play as Jake Hunter, a private detective who is enjoying his drink at the bar while a strange man starts talking to him. One of the coworkers of this strange man dared the strange man to go inside an abounded house in the middle of the night. There are a lot of tales about this house and they all have a pattern. The house is cursed and everybody who enters and/or lives in the house is going to die in an accident. 

Jake doesn’t waste time and investigates the house and indeed finds a dead body of a homeless man. When you discover that the homeless man has been murdered and when you meet the owner of the house who lives in a small shack at the back of the giant house/mansion, a chain of events is started that takes Jake Hunter on an adventure with everything you would want in a detective story.  

In terms of the game delivering on my high expectations in terms of story and pacing, the game fully delivers. The only shame is that you miss some backstory and interactions with the characters which isn’t referenced too much. It’s like starting to watch a police series from the 3rd or 4th season in. But apart from that minor complaint, the story is still good enough to take you in it’s world and take you along on the adventure. 

I do have to mention that so far I have only spent my time with the main case on offer. In total, there are 6 cases in this game. In order to not spoil myself, I have decided to play these cases in order. So far, I’m still in the first case which has the same title as the game. 

This game also has voice acting, there are short Japanese lines spoken to breathe a bit more life into the characters but don’t expect them to be fully voice acted. Most of the dialogue is written out in text boxes. And about them, I do have some complaints. 

The first complaint is the fact that the color used for some characters matches the color for Jake thinking or preforming actions. I find this rather confusing and I think that it would have been better if another color had been used or another font or even put it in cursive. 

The second complaint is that the game asks you to remember who has which dialogue color. So, if you have forgotten that the green text is for another officer, well too bad… The game doesn’t tell you who is talking. 

While I do have two complaints about the dialogue system, I got used to it quite quickly. I kept these two issues in the back of my mind while I was playing the game. Overall, they didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the game too much but I was so glad that I could use the up and down arrows to move through a short history of the dialogues to check out where I went wrong. 

Handholding Police Work

So, the story and pacing lives up to my high bar of expectations. But does the rest of the game live up to my expectations? Well, let’s talk about that. 

In terms of gameplay, you can compare this game most to the Ace Attorney series. You interview people and go to various locations to investigate and gather evidence to find the culprit. 

Now, unlike Ace Attorney, this game can be extremely handholdy. What I mean with that is that it’s almost unlikely that you leave a scene without finding all the evidence and/or talking to everybody. This take a lot away from the challenge in my opinion. So, if you are looking for a challenging game, I think that this game might not be the right one for you. 

It isn’t a cake walk either. Since some parts of the investigations require some pixel hunting. So, if you are stuck in a search, take a good look at everything. If the joystick is too sensitive, use the D-Pad for more accuracy. If only spots you haven’t investigated sparkled or gave some sort of identification, this would have helped so much.  

There are some cutscenes in this game, most of them are used to set up the start and/or end of a chapter. I’ll talk more about the scenes when I’m going to talk about the visuals of this game. But there is a thing I want to mention before that. The save system. 

This game doesn’t have any feature to speed up and/or skip these cutscenes to my knowledge. And why is this important? Well, because you only have three save slots. Yes, three save slots. For all the 6 cases. Man, I wish I had three save slots per case or one per case. Oh well, this isn’t too big of a deal since this game is quite linear so you can at least save for 3 different cases without loosing your progress in one. 

Which is a good thing since it’s quite tricky to find your latest save. Thankfully, it tells you how far you got into the case before you load the save file. But that information would have been way more useful on the box of the save file itself. 

Apart from that, I don’t have any other UI complaints. So let’s return to talk about the gameplay. The core gameplay consists mainly out of two parts. Talking and investigations. Let’s start with the talking one first. 

I could start explaining how every mechanic works in detail but that would make this article quite long. So, take it from me that you learn how to use the UI quite fast due to the excellent tutorial chapter. Now, about the first core mechanic, the talking. Of course, you have your normal conversations where you either share information with other characters or just gather information. In itself, this isn’t the difficult part. The “difficult” part is the interrogation of some characters or the “Talk Profile”. 

When you are doing the “Talk Profile” of somebody, you have to choose the right angle of attack to get the information out of somebody. It’s a bit like the cross examination in the Ace Attorney series without the penalty part. If you get it wrong, you can try over again without seeing a game over screen once. The same mechanic is applied when you are deducing something or thinking which action you should take next. 

The second core mechanic of this game is the investigation. Apart from moving from place to place, you can investigate a location at certain parts of the story. In these parts, the pixel hunting can be huge. At least two times I have been stuck at an investigation because I hadn’t found one clue. Oh well, spam clicking sometimes helps or revisiting the game with a fresh mind after a good night sleep helped as well. 

If these two mechanics weren’t into the game, this game would be a kinetic novel. This game doesn’t provide a lot of challenge but I keep finding it fun to play. I find it funny that there is even a sort of hint system in this amazingly linear game. Then again, it once helped me in the pixel hunting since I overlooked something. 

Comic books

Visually, this game reminds me a lot of reading a comic book. There are barely any animations in this game apart from the UI elements but on the screen, there isn’t a lot of animation. Sound effects are used to great effect in this game as well as clever camera motions during the cutscenes. The box-art of the game also adds to the idea of a comic book further. For some reason, I find it quite refreshing to see this visual style. It sparks my imagination to make the characters come to live and how they act. 

The presentation of this game is quite detailed and I applaud the amount of work that the designers have put into this game. It really looks like you are playing through a comic book. The characters really look like I would image them and together with the minor pieces of voice acting and the sound design, the game comes to live.

Speaking of the sound design, I’m really impressed with it. It walks that fine line of adding tension and not being too present to get annoying. In addition to that, the soundtrack. This soundtrack is quite enjoyable. I found it quite surprising that the intro theme of this game even had some sung lyrics. No other track of in the soundtrack is like that.

So, the cutscenes are a perfect example on how this game works like a living comic book. There are barely any animations in these as well. For some people, this would be a negative of this game but in my eyes, I find that it adds to the atmosphere quite well.

Now, I think it high time to get some minor nitpicks out of the way before I finish my overall opinion on this game. The minor things that annoyed me through my playthrough.

First of all, I would have loved that some checkmark or something like that appeared next the questions I couldn’t get more information over. Since that would have saved me some time asking repeat questions.

Secondly, I hated that if you finished a dialogue, you weren’t always able to use the DPAD to watch the history of the conversation. Thankfully, I save often so it isn’t too big of a deal to reload my manually saved file and replay a part of the game.

Thirdly, saving in the middle of a dialogue means that the save restarts at the beginning of a certain scene. So, keep that in mind and don’t be alarmed when you have to redo a converstation.

The fourth thing is that when you are in the game, you are unable to get to the options menu. Only in the main menu, you are able to see the options menu.

And the final and 5th thing is that when the game tells you, you can advance by touching the screen it expects you to touch in exact spots. For example, if you check your log, you have to touch the paper in order for you to see more. While this helps immersion, I would have loved a sort of scroll bar instead… Yet, the biggest issue is when you have to tap the bottom of the screen while the rest of the screen doesn’t react on your touch.

In conclusion, I think it’s clear that I’m enjoying myself with this game quite a lot. Honestly, I highly recommend this game to everybody who enjoys games like Ace Attorney or CSI. I find the story well written and the visual presentation is a nice change of pace of the highly animated and detailed characters of the more recent adventure/detective games.

Sadly enough, it makes a few mistakes in terms of pixel hunting and the lack of a real difficulty… But the positives are so good that it highly outweighs the negatives in my opinion. It’s so enjoyable that I went on eBay to buy myself a copy of the DS game that was the first Jake Hunter game ever come out in the west. I want to experience more of this series while I haven’t finished 1 out of the 6 cases in this game.

So yes, I’m quite sure that I’ll finish this game and maybe write a review about it if other interesting things appear like what is hidden in the gallery after you finish a case. But apart from that, I have said everything that I wanted to say about this game so I think it’s high time for my usual outro.

Thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

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Review: DooM (PC – Steam) ~ Let’s Give Hell, Hell!

Steam Store page – Wikipedia Entry – Official website

Since I upgraded my graphics card late last year, I wanted to play a game I wasn’t able to play before. I had a GTX 660 in my machine which was just not strong enough to play DooM 2016 at a decent framerate. So, when I installed my NVIDIA GTX 1050Ti, I bought myself a copy of DooM 2016 and started playing it. Ever since DooM came out, I wanted to play it. But yeah, 2016 was jam packed with other amazing titles I wanted to play. Rise of The Tomb Raider, Rayman Legends, Stella Glow, Zero Time Dilemma and Bioshock Infinite to name just a few. So yeah, I’m sorry that I haven’t played DooM when it came out but let me make that up by reviewing the game right now. And as usual, feel free to leave a comment with your opinion on the game and/or the content of this article in the comment section down below. But now, let’s give Hell… Hell.

Those pesky demons.

So, in this shooter, you play as the slayer. The Doom guy that took down all of those demons all those years ago. Like the original two Doom games, you are a silent protagonist. The story itself takes a back seat for the gameplay. Most of the story and exposition is told through runes and the environment. This made me few scripted cutscenes tipping on the edge of immersion breaking for me. 

The voice acting in this game is pretty well done. But, that didn’t save the story of being predictable. I was able to predict the ending from a mile away. Around the mid-point of the game, I was able to call out the ending. I wouldn’t consider this a negative if the game didn’t take it’s lore so seriously. So yeah, the story didn’t click with me at all. 

Yet, the voice acting in this game is just amazing. First of all, there are just a few voice actors for this game but they did their job almost perfectly. While hearing the same voice line from the intercom for the 20th time was a tad bit annoying, it didn’t make the line have any less impact. It started to feel a bit calming to hear the ending when all the demons where dead. Couple that with amazing grunts of the demons and the voice acting is something that actually kept me interested in the story believe it or not. 

Before I continue this review, I do have to mention that I haven’t spend any time with the multiplayer. That’s because I’m not that fond of playing multiplayer games in general. So, I’m sorry but if you want a review of the multiplayer component, you will have to look elsewhere. 

Fun in repetition

If you want to know how this game plays, well, then just think of the original Doom games but now you are able to jump, double jump and preform way more brutal kills. This might sound harsh but the core gameplay of this game is basically just that. 

You go from monster room to monster room, where you have to defeat all demons before you can move on. Of course, the difficulty ramps up with every monster room you encounter, but I have to be honest… I was so glad that there were moments of platforming and exploration to give some diversity in between the shooting or I would have called the game too repetitive. 

This game divided into several levels, called missions in this game. You can always go back and replay those missions to try and find the collectibles you have missed. There are also hidden classic Doom maps that just pull on my nostalgic strings even more than the nostalgic gameplay. I do have an issue with the collectibles though. You can find these vinyl figurines of the Doom guy scattered everywhere. Most of these give you access to models of the demons. That reward would be worth it if only I would have been able to see them. For some reason, they are completely transparent in my game. 

Anyways, I might be riffing a bit on the gameplay here. But please don’t get me wrong. While the core gameplay loop is quite basic and repetitive, I don’t mean that it isn’t fun to play. The game is an enjoyable ride from start to finish. The shooting feels just right with the various amount of weapons and abilities you have and the amount of various demons you have to fight. Also, in this game, there is a lot of variety in the ways that demons act. 

Some demons charge at you and stun you, others climb up walls to try and get an advantage. You have to keep moving and be aware of your surroundings in order for you to survive. Also, people who play a lot of modern shooters will have to get used to the fact that you don’t regenerate health automatically. 

There are two ways to get your health back up. You either find a medkit or you preform a glory kill on a demon. Now, glory killing a demon doesn’t 100% guarantee you health drops, but the chance is quite high. Now, what is glory killing? Well, that means you have wounded the demon enough to put it in a stun. At that moment it starts flashing blue for a while. When it starts to flash orange, your time to get a glory kill is almost up. 

So, when you press the button when you are close to an enemy that’s flashing, you finish said enemy with a rather nice animation. The first few times, seeing this animation is pretty satisfying. But, I felt that it got old nearing the end of the playthrough. Since there are just a few animations that it could be, so after seeing it 50 times, I just wanted an option to be able to skip it. 

Now, speaking of options, I want to take this chance to talk about some strange design decisions that were taken for this game when it comes to the menu design. First of all, you are only able to access the options menu when you have loaded a save file. The reason why this is an issue is that I recently got a new monitor that can handle a resolution that my GPU and CPU can’t handle to output this kind of game on the higher graphic settings. The lag was just extremely annoying and took a lot of time to change. 

Secondly, why is there no apply button in the settings menu? I get the impression it’s there somewhere since when I change a setting the game asks me that if I’m sure about my new settings since I didn’t save nor applied them. 

And finally, and this is something that isn’t 100% UI related but… There are these rune missions that you can do to get new abilities. When I have finished a mission and I find a new rune challenge, I get kicked out of the mission. Why does this happen? Since that doesn’t happen during the first time I was playing the mission. 

And before I talk about the abilities, can I mention how annoying I think that autosaves can be? Image this, you want to stop playing after you finally defeated a challenging room. So, you quit the game, saying “Unsaved progress will be lost.”… That’s fine, but when was the last autosave again? Oh, and you can’t manually save. Oh, fun for the whole family! With that rant over, let’s talk about abilities. 

Too much red and brown.

So, you do have different abilities. These can range from weapon abilities to abilities of the Doom guy itself. Now, I’m not going to spoil them but they are quite worth looking for the ways to upgrade them. Since they will help you during your quest to slay the demons. 

I especially loved the weapon challenges. The pistol one was a fun one to do, since I only found out of this mechanic near the ending of the game. And that’s killing demons with a charged headshot and take a wild guess how few weak enemies there were in the later levels. Yup, close to zero. 

Most of this game is quite linear. You go from room to room with platforming sections in between. You do have the radar at the top of the screen to guide you in the right direction when you don’t know where to go next. But, the map in the tab screen can be a great help as well, especially when you are looking for those missed secrets. 

Now, I do have to mention one thing. If you want some challenge and you have played games like Tomb Raider or any other shooter in the past, do yourself a favor and don’t play on the easiest difficulty setting. When you are fully powered up near the end, the game just becomes a cake walk then. Most of my playthrough was on normal and I didn’t had a lot of trouble with it, so I don’t dare to think how easy it will be on the lower difficulty settings. 

So, I do want to talk about the audiovisual design that is presented to you in this 10 to 12 hour adventure through hell and back and on Mars. There is too much brown and dark early evening colors used. But, that isn’t such a big deal in my opinion. You can paint it red with the blood of your enemy demons… 😛 Anyways, visually the game looks amazing. One minor detail is that I often had moments where I had a ton of loading issues. Not that the game loaded slow or weird, but that the details loaded in way slower then models. I think that the technical term for that is calling issues, but I’m not too sure. But that might be an issue of my slightly older hardware I used to play this game, so when you are running a more modern computer, you might not run into this issue. If you are wondering, I’m using an i7-4820K, 16GB of 666MHz DDR3 RAM and a GTX 1050Ti, so it ain’t that bad of a machine. It’s a shame though, since the visual design of this game is really well done and detailed. 

Anyways, I loved the visual design of Hell the most. I can’t explain why but I really enjoyed the design of the scenery. Maybe I’m a bit burned out on seeing abandoned factories or ships with broken walls and wires hanging everywhere and then the overload of blood on walls, I think it was the breath of fresh air I needed. 

On top of that, you have the amazing visual design of the demons you can fight together with their amazing animation. In some battles, I really felt the adrenaline pumping through my veins. The game can get that intense. Especially during the boss fights, those were great. And those were puzzles in itself and as soon you had solved them and found the weakspot of the boss, it felt so amazing to finally kill them with an amazingly animated glory kill.

That brings me to the music and audio design. Let’s talk about the music first. The music is a mix between electronic and metal music. The main focus is on the metal in the soundtrack. While I prefer electronic music over metal music, I do have to say that I enjoyed this soundtrack quite a lot and I’m quite happy that I was able to get the soundtrack on Steam as well. I have already added it to my music library and my writing playlists. 

The audio design is equally as great. The monster grunts, the sounds that you make while jumping or shooting… Man, it’s gratifying. The sound effects are the perfect tool to aid you to do the right thing admits the chaos of fighting hoards of demons. The only weird thing I want to mention is that, when I got out of range to hear what a rune was saying and I came back, the rune just stopped playing it’s voice clip. Even when it wasn’t fully finished. 

Anyways, I have talked about almost everything I wanted to say about this game. If I would continue further, I would either start rambling or start nitpicking and I think it would be a better idea then to go on to the conclusion of this article. 

Conclusion

The bad:

-The story is a bit meh while the lore that’s there could have made it so much better.

-The gameplay is a tad bit repetitive sometimes. 

-Some strange UI/menu decisions. 

-Some calling issues that quickly fix themselves. 

-The easier difficulty is a tad bit too easy.

The good:

+ Even when the gameplay is repetitive, it’s still a rush to play. 

+ Amazing locations to shoot through.

+ A ton of nostalgic throwbacks. 

+ An amazing health system that rewards players to get close to dangerous enemies. 

+ …

Final thoughts:

Was Doom 4 worth the 4 year wait I had to do to play it. Let me put it this way, I’m glad I play it but it isn’t the best game I have played in recent years. Most of it has to do with the sometimes repetitive gameplay. For some reason, I want to compare it to the Tomb Raider games. While those games are completely different, I still felt that they are somewhat similar in structure. With the ability to explore around, fight enemies in closed spaces and find secrets to upgrade your gear or find additional lore. And once that comparison got into my head, I just wanted to play more Tomb Raider since I enjoyed those games more than Doom 2016.

Now, does that make DooM 4 a bad game? Oh heavens and hell, no! The game is still a rush to play through from start to finish. If you enjoy shooters or games in the style of Tomb Raider or Bioshock, I think it would be a shame to skip this game. But, I do think that this game is a tad bit overhyped. It’s not THAT good since I could have done so much more especially in terms of exploration. 

Maybe Doom Eternal fixes a lot of the gripes I have with the amazing DooM 4, but I do have to upgrade my rig first for that. So, maybe in a few years you might see a review of the sequel from me. 

But in all seriousness, Doom 4 is a really good game. While it wasn’t always my cup of tea and it didn’t always pull me in like I expected it would or compared to other games, I’m so happy that I played this game and I’m even considering replaying this game in the future like I did with all the Bioshock games and Tomb Raider games recently. 

And with that said, I really said everything I wanted to say about this game. I want to thank you for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another one but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care. 

Score: 80/100

Game Quicky: I Spy Spooky Mansion (Wii) ~ An Unexpected Remake!

Wikipedia page

Sometimes you don’t expect a game to get a remake. One of these games is “I Spy Spooky Mansion”. I have fond memories of playing this game on my aunt’s computer when I went over to her place. A few years ago, I was able to snag my own copy during a garage sale. Now, when I was browsing eBay for cheap old Wii games, I found this game. I got confused. I honestly thought that somebody mislabeled this game. I thought there was no way for a game from 1999 to get a port to the Wii in 2010. But, the truth is quite different. This game did get a port in 2010 and got released to the Wii in North America. I say North America, but it’s quite possible that this game also got released in the EU, but I haven’t seen a copy in the stores. Now, I played this Wii port and this article will talk about my opinions on the game. Maybe in a future article, I’ll talk about my thoughts and opinions on the PC version of the game. But, now I kindly invite you to leave a comment in the comment section down below with your opinion on the game and/or the content of this article. 

The good

The story of this game isn’t 100% the same. Well, sort of. You are still trapped in the spooky mansion together with Skelly and you have to escape. But, the method of escaping is different in this version of the game. I won’t spoil it, but I enjoy the original and the new endings to the game.

The sound design of this game is amazing. Compared to the original, this game feels more alive. There are a lot of obvious “spooks” in the game, like when you are upstairs, you hear somebody going up the stairs. Not to mention, the voice acting for Skelly is amazing. I personally enjoy the voice acting in this game more than the original. Well, I also have to compare a dubbed version of the game with the original English voice work now, so take that how you want.

The gameplay is mostly unchanged in this port of the game. You still get an I Spy riddle where you have to find a handful of objects inside a certain area. With easy to understand controls, you have to find these objects in the scene. The big difference with the original is the fact that most of the scenes are in 3D or are bigger than the screen itself. In the original, you have a 2D picture to “stare” at, to find all the objects. I quite like this style and it allowed the developers to put more details in the scene and hide the objects in more creative ways.

Apart from that, there are some gimmick Wii minigames where you have to make a certain motion with the Wii remote to win the minigame and find the hidden object. While you can’t really lose these minigames, they are a nice distraction from the hidden object quest. One minor thing that annoyed me was the fact that I couldn’t skip the tutorial speak and that the tutorial box stayed a bit too long on screen in my opinion.

While it would have been amazing to freely walk around in the mansion, sadly enough, that’s not the case in this game. You can walk around by pointing and using the A button to go into a moving transition. This minor change compared to the original makes the mansion feel more alive. In the original, you had to click on a door and you immediately moved through it. In this game, you go through a, sadly inescapable, cut scene.

The hidden object scenes are quite easy to spot. While exploring through the mansion, the scenes where you can play an I Spy riddle play a small animation. While some areas are the same compared to the original like the dining room and the kitchen, there are a few new rooms like underneath the bed and a board game in the living room. Fun times!

The bad

While the explore able mansion isn’t that large, I think it would be great if a map feature would have been implemented. Once or twice I wanted to go to a room and I forgot if it was downstairs or upstairs. Then again, this is only a minor problem since you were able to get quickly up and downstairs.

Something that I could also critique in the original and that’s still present here is the fact that you can still access the puzzles you have completed. This makes it quite annoying when you are looking for that final piece of the puzzle to beat the game. Now, I totally understand the reason for that decision. In the middle of the game, you need to look for pieces of paper and those are hidden inside parts of the puzzle.

Now, I might be spoiled by playing a ton of casual games/hidden object games but a hint button would have been an amazing addition. Sometimes I got stuck because I wasn’t able to find one hidden object and I restored to spam clicking the entire screen. In addition to that, it would be nice if I had some sort of sound effect or something on-screen when I reached the end of where I could go. Some puzzles go from left to right but not the full 360°, so either make the player hit a wall or give a visual clue that you can’t continue to move the camera.

While the sound design is really well done, the music is a major letdown. While there is some music in the game, it’s nothing to write home about. Most of this game is played in silence together with the great sound design. It’s a bummer since a lot of horror or horror-themed games have amazing soundtracks and I really missed it in this game.

Conclusion

This port surprised me. In a good way. While this game isn’t perfect and could use some polishing, I enjoyed my time with this game. I wanted to complete this game to see what they changed in this version and how it played. The differences with the original PC version of the game are refreshing changes to the formula.

If you enjoyed the original, puzzle games, casual games or hidden object games; this game is a perfect short title to play through. I highly recommend it when you are into those style of games. Now, if you didn’t get interested in this game during this review, I would highly advise you to stay away from this game since the repetitiveness gets boring really fast.

I’m so glad that I gave this game a chance and didn’t write it off as another piece of Wii shovelware. It’s an enjoyable title for young and old. While I could totally understand people not really liking this game, I argue that this game has a lot to offer and enjoy. I might not go replaying this game in the near future, but who knows… Maybe one day.

And with that, I think I have said everything I wanted to say about this game. Thank you so much for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Score: 70/100

 

Review: Death Mark (Switch) ~ Alive Until Dawn

Official website

You are walking on a street and you overhear two schoolgirls talking to each other. They tell a story about one of their teachers dying in a horrible death. Her arm was found in the library of the school, cut off from the rest of the body with a red bite mark on the hand. That’s how Death Mark opens. The game I decided to play during the Halloween season because I already finished Angels of Death by then. Since I started playing the Zero Escape series and Corpse Party, I have been hooked on the horror genre. I wanted to play more horror games or games with a strong focus on horror. It doesn’t need to be survival horror like Resident Evil 4 or Silent Hill but a game that fits the mood of the holiday perfectly. Now, I know I’m terribly late with my review of this game. But, it was part of my top 10 games of 2018 list and I want to give my honest opinion on it. So, let’s talk about the PS Vita game that got ported to the Switch called Death Mark. As usual, feel free to leave a comment with your opinion of the game and/or the content of this article in the comment section down below.

Alive until dawn

So, the story of this game centers around the mystery of the mysterious Death Mark people has been receiving. This red bit mark appears on people’s bodies when they interact with spirits. The protagonist of this game suffers from your typical case of memory loss and doesn’t remember his past. After you heard the two girls their story, your own mark starts to burn and you get teleported to a mansion. When you enter the mansion, you find it to be abandoned. When you visit one of the bedrooms, a thunder crack reveals the dead body of a girl on the floor with flowers blooming from her stomach and chest. Startled, you run down starts where you meet up with a doll that explains to you that the Death Mark is quite real.

If you are unable to remove your mark, you will die by the time dawn comes. One theory that you quickly form is that you can possibly remove the mark by killing or defeating a spirit. But, how do you kill a spirit? How do you kill something that is already dead? Well, by trying to solve the grudge that is keeping them in the living realm.

After you got the explanation of the living wooden doll that lives on the sofa in the entrance of the mansion, you heard a knock on the door. You open the door and find two teenagers. They are looking for the previous inhabitant of the mansion. She is a spiritual healer and they are looking for her help to get rid of the same mark you possess. It’s revealed that she was the dead body you discovered earlier. So, you try and take her place. So, now you start in trying to help the other people with a Death Mark while trying to discover who you are and which spirit gave you your Death Mark.

All of this is explained in a quite lengthy introduction. The writing of this game is amazing. If this story sounds interesting to you, I have to give you a fair warning. This game is a visual novel adventure game. There is quite a lot of text in this game. If you aren’t interested in playing a game that has more dialogue then gameplay, this isn’t your game.

I do have to say that the writing is amazing in this game. The story has a weird charm. On one hand, the game has amazing characters and great development. It didn’t take long before I got attached to certain characters and I got quite invested in them. Yet, this game is also a horror game. So, a lot of creepy stuff happens on your journey. From finding dead bodies to combating spirits, this game has it all. This game has just the perfect mix between the two worlds and I have no complaints about them. The pacing of the game is just perfect as well.

The only minor disappointment is that the characters are voice acted in Japanese. Now, I don’t mind the Japanese voice acting that much, but I personally prefer English voice acting. The whole game isn’t voice acted, but quite a lot is. The voice acted that is present in the game is really great. But, I’m not going to critique it too much since I don’t know enough about Japanese to say it’s good or bad. But, from my personal experience, I feel that the voice actors always used the right emotion to what appears on the screen.

This game has 6 chapters. The original PS Vita game had 5 chapters and one DLC chapter. The DLC chapter is included for free in this Switch port. There is something in terms of the chapters I’m quite on the fence about. The chapters themselves are not too long nor too short. But, if you combine all playtime to get through the game and fully beat it, this game takes around 8 to 10 hours to complete. This game is quite short, too short even.

Near the end, I was so invested in the game, I was extremely bummed when I finished the final chapter. I wanted to play more, explore the world and setting of the game a bit more. But alas. Thankfully, this game doesn’t have a lot of filler content. The story in some chapters can go at a breakneck pace and that was a refreshing experience.

Explore and read

One of my favorite genres in video games is the visual novel. There are two types of visual novels; the ones with gameplay and the kinetic ones. The kinetic ones almost have no gameplay and I honestly dislike playing. This game isn’t a kinetic novel. In this game, you have to explore various areas where a spirit is roaming. During your exploration, you have to find a reason for the grudge of the spirit.

While you are exploring the area, you can come across live or death situations. You get presented with different options and if you choose the wrong option, you get a game over. In some cases, you lose soul power. What is this soul power? It’s the power of your soul, when this drops to 0, the spirit of the chapter catches you right away.

When you are in a live or death situation, you are timed. The remaining time you have is the remaining soul power you have. During your exploration, you can find talismans that restore your soul power if it gets low. Now that I have beaten the game, I can say that there is no additional reward when you answer all the questions correctly without losing soul power. This is a missed opportunity. It would be great if this unlocked the additional 6^th chapter or some character art.

Anyways, your soul powerfully restores in-between chapters. So, you aren’t punished for mistakes in an earlier chapter. Personally, my favorite chapter is the 6^th chapter. The moral of that chapter speaks to me on a personal level.

Now, there are two different endings to this game. The ending that you get depends if you are able to fully solve the grudge of the spirit of that chapter. So, when it comes to the climax of each chapter, think long and hard before you make your next move. Since one mistake during those battles can change the ending dramatically.

Speaking about the climax of each chapter, think carefully about who you take as a partner on your journey. Sometimes you will be unable to defeat a spirit if you don’t have the right character in your party. I loved trying to work out who would be the best character to use against the spirit. Reading their character profile is even more important now than before. My advice is, save often. You are only able to save outside of dialogue sections. So, don’t be a hero and save after you made some progress. Also, pay attention that this game doesn’t automatically save. And when you are dead, you have to restart from your last save point. You can save using the “Y” button. There are a limited amount of save slots, so use them wisely.

Saving is this game is quite easy. After the introduction, you can save when you are in the mansion in a limited amount of save slots. Now, if you want to be able to restart a chapter, I highly advise you to save right after the introduction of the chapter. Since there is no other way to start from a certain chapter. The only option in the main menu are: new game, continue or a gallery. In this gallery, you can see the animation of the spirits and the images you saw during the chapter.

In terms of UI, this game is good. I have no real complaints. I do have some minor suggestions. Especially with the inventory screen. This would feel so much better if the inventory screen had a static image of the item you have selected. Now, it’s just a boring-looking list of items, like you would see in a spreadsheet.

Anyways, sometimes the story of one spirit links to the story of another spirit. In that case, you can always read a small summary in the pause menu. During that, you can watch the amazing full-screen pictures that were used during the chapter.

During each chapter, you have to explore a location. You can only explore with one partner. The other partner or partners will stay at the mansion to look for clues in solving the mystery of the Death Mark. You can go at any moment to the entrance of the location to take the car back to the mansion to change partners. Like I said earlier, the choice of partner matters. If you are unable to solve a puzzle or pass through a location, try having another partner.

The locations themselves aren’t that large. It doesn’t take too long before you are able to fully explore the location. Now, there is something to do in each and every screen of the game. From small jump scares to big puzzles. Oh yes, this game has small jump scares. Most of the jump scares are rather subtle and aren’t too distracting from the exploration. To be honest, I found them used quite well. Also, it’s possible that you don’t even see all the jump scares since they are location specific.

During your journey for the truth in the Death Mark mystery, you explore a forest, a school, and various other locations. Each location is extremely memorable. The detail in the artwork of each location is impressive. The atmosphere building with the visual presentation in this game is a strong point of this game. I really felt on edge while exploring certain locations. I really felt that the location I was exploring had a certain presence and a morbid history to it. On some occasions, the game managed to get underneath my skin.

Now, in terms of the animations, this game has a lot of missed potential. Apart from the spirit battles, this game doesn’t have a lot of animations. I think it would have been better if the game had a bit more animations and scene transitions. For example, a walking animation from going between rooms would aid a lot with the world-building and immersion. And if you give the option to the players to turn this animation on or off, it would be perfect. Now, there is a small dialogue box that appears when you move between rooms with a sound effect, but could be so much more.

On the edge of my seat

Exploration in this game is really well done. During the game, you are able to use your flashlight to investigate each and every room. I highly advise that you look around carefully in each and every room. Since every little detail can aid you in your quest to solve the grudge of the spirit. The game helps you out a bit in the investigation. When you can interact with something, you see a little sparkle animation when you hover over it with your flashlight.

When you have to use an item in your quest, the item will be automatically used. Expect during the spirit battles. In those battles, you have to use every item in your inventory to try and defend yourself. You and the spirit take turns in making a move. If the spirit comes too close, it’s game over.

Apart from one puzzle, the puzzles in this game are well crafted. They really test your skills in exploring the area you are in and your investigation skills. Exploring the location gets even better with the fluid controls. The flashlight is mapped to one of the joysticks of the joycon and reacts very responsively.

Now, there is one thing that could turn some people off and that is the map system. During the exploration, you have a mini-map of the location at the top right. This mini-map is nothing more than a few squares and lines on how the squares connect. So, you will have to build a mental map of the location during your exploration. This is highly essential when you don’t want to get lost. A more detailed map would have been welcome, but I felt it added to the world-building of the game. Remember the story? You only have the few short hours of the night to try and get rid of the grudge of the spirit before you die. So, creating an actual map might lose too much time.

The controls in this game are quite decent. Sometimes I got a bit disoriented, but that’s because of my mediocre navigational skills in games. It doesn’t take long before you get used to the control scheme of this game and learn to use it to your advantage.

The exploration is added with some great sound and music design. The soundtrack sounds like a combination of the Zero Escape series, Ace Attorney and Corpse Party. The music gives off eerie vibes and fits the visual presentation like a glove. I’m actually hunting down the soundtrack of this game to add it to my music library.

Together with the amazing sound effects, the visual and audiovisual presentation of this game is a real treat. I can’t make any complaints about that aspect of the game. Before I keep repeating myself, I think it’s time that we talk about another aspect of the game.

The difficulty of this game is just right. The game is even more difficult when you don’t pay attention during the investigation. In the later chapters, I even took some physical notes to aid myself during the investigation.

Now, if you forgot to save, there is a button that you can use to fast forward the cut scenes. I rarely used this button since I was too invested in the story. I used this button only once when I forgot to save before a LIVE OR DEATH situation and I got a game over… Now, I could have used the “decide again” option to restart from the beginning of the LIVE OR DEATH situation but I lost too much soul power. So, restarting from an earlier point actually benefited me.

Also, there is a message log you can access. A minor complaint is that the button to fast forward is quite hidden in the UI. It’s the L-button.

The replay value of his game isn’t too high. Not counting replays for fun, you can play twice through the game before you have seen it all. Now, this isn’t a big issue but more endings would extend the already short overall game time.

With that said, I said almost everything I wanted to say about this game. I think it’s high time to go to the summary and closing statement of this review.

Summary

The good:

+ Amazing atmosphere in the visual and audio department.

+ Great writing.

+ The game has a lot of text.

+ …

The bad:

• The game is too short.
• The game has a lot of text.
• A bit more animations would enhance the game a lot.
• You can’t restart a chapter without a save.

Final thoughts:

This game is not for everybody. If you don’t like a game that has a lot of text, I think that it’s best for you to skip this game. If you enjoy games like Ace Attorney, Zero Escape, Walking Dead, Corpse Party, Trace Memory… I highly recommend this game.

This game is the perfect game to play through on Halloween night or whenever you are in the mood to play more horror focused games. The writing, pacing, audio and visual presentation of this game is very well done. The biggest flaw of this game is that it’s too short. I got so invested and the ride was over before I knew it.

Now, a spiritual successor is going to be released in Japan really soon called NG. I really hope and wish that they are going to bring this game to the west as well. Since the trailer looks amazing and I really would love to play it.

I can totally see why some people would be turned off by this game. But personally, I loved my playthrough. When you play this game, don’t use a walkthrough. This game gets even more fun when you aren’t using a walkthrough to guide you every step of the way.

If you ask me, I think that this game is totally worth its price. This developer really convinced me of the quality games they can put out. While this game has flaws, in my eyes they don’t ruin the experience at all. But, I’m really going to hammer this home… This game would be perfect if there were a bit more chapters. A bit more content.

And with that said, I have really said everything I could say about this game. I want to thank you for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!

Score: 90/100

My top 25 DS games of all time. (Part 2/3)

25 – 20

Welcome to part 2!

#19: Might & Magic: Clash Of Heroes

Look! There is a dragon on the box-art. Best game ever made! 10/10. Next game.

My love for dragons has nothing to do with this game. It was only a lame joke to start my explanation for my pick for the 19th spot.

I do love playing puzzle games sometimes. But when there is a battle element involved, I enjoy it even more. It has also been released on Steam, so you can enjoy it on the PC as well.

I have to admit that I haven’t beaten the game. But I’m really trying to find time to play this game. Sadly enough, this is a game I can only play in short bursts. That’s mostly due to the nature of the gameplay. But I’m sure that some people might be able to keep playing this game for hours on end.

What I have seen from the game shows that this game is a very good game. Further proof is that on some lists of forgotten gems on the DS, this game appears. So, I don’t have to further proof myself… I think.

 #18: Orcs And Elves

Sometimes, I love myself a good dungeon crawler and adventure game. This game nails most of the things I was looking for in these kinds of games. The game feels old, which made me love it even more. Yet, I was surprised how this game is a port of a mobile game. And this port is actually pretty well made. iDSoftware and EA worked on it after all. (And there aren’t any microtransactions from EA, thankfully.)

In this game, you play an elf that is fighting the orcs to stop corrupting the land. You fight through various dungeons and explore them. Best of all, it’s in 3D. So, that makes the atmosphere even better. What I love most of all, is that this game is turn based. If you make a move, your enemies make a move as well. This makes the game very tactical.

I haven’t beaten this game since the final boss is pretty brutal. At least, to me. Maybe, when I restart playing this game and thought out the evolution of my character a bit better, I might be able to defeat that boss. We shall see. And maybe then I’ll write a review about it! So yeah, we shall see.

#17: Ghost Trick

Recently, I have beaten a game called M.U.R.D.E.R.E.D. – Soul Suspect. My buddy, Seraph made a great video review for it. I highly recommend you guys watching it some time.

But this game is how it should have been. This visual novel and adventure game puts you in the role of a ghost. You have to avoid the death of a character by going a few minutes back in time. Then you have to poltergeist items to change the course of history.

The game became really memorable to me because one of the characters is a black cat, one that reminds me a lot of my own cat, Sparta. If only, my real life cat could talk to me.

When I started writing about this game, I actually wanted to replay this game. Since the memories are getting vague. Which is a good thing, because I remember enjoying this game a whole lot. Maybe, one day, I might write an article about it.

#16: Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures

It would be a shame if I hadn’t put an Indiana Jones game on this list, right? Well, here it is! Lego Indiana Jones. I know that there is a sequel and an other game of my favorite hero on the DS, but I don’t think they deserve a spot on this list (yet). Because, I haven’t played them enough.

This game is simply one of the best LEGO games I have ever played. In 2014, there is an overdose of LEGO games with all a similar formula.

This game is pretty fun to play. It follows the plot of the movies pretty close. It helps introducing the movies to a younger audience, since it doesn’t contain the graphical scenes which made the movies not meant for their eyes. The humor of this game makes it even better. I actually laughed with some jokes they made with the characters I love.

I hope that the sequel can bring me the same joy. I finally got myself a copy, so fingers crossed!

#15: Wario games (Best: Wario: Master Of Disguise)

I know what some readers are already thinking. Isn’t this cheating? Putting these games on spot 15, while I put all the Mario games on spot 23? No, it’s not cheating. The reason behind it, is that these games are pretty different from the Mario series in my opinion.

The honorable mention for this spot is WarioWare D.I.Y., which helped DS gamers to make their own mini-games. That was simply an amazing experience.

But if this spot has to go to one game, it has to be Wario: Master Of Disguise. Because I think that this game has a brilliant idea behind it.

You play in the role of Wario. He just stole a magic wand that gives him the ability to transform in different suits that give him special powers. Maybe, I should take a closer look in a review or something?

 #14: Super Scribblenauts

In the past, the Scribblenauts series was criminally overlooked. Because the game was on the DS, it looked like a kids game. While in reality, it’s one of the best games to be creative in.

I could have put the original too in this spot, but there is a reason why I don’t. Super Scribblenauts is just a better game then it’s original. It surpasses the original by so much.

While the user interface isn’t the best I have seen on the system, it’s highly addictive to play. Oh, you might be wondering what this game is about? Let me tell you, it’s about writing things to helps people. The people in Maxwell’s (main character) area aren’t very smart. So, you have to write words on your magic notepad.

The words you write however, come to life. In this version they added adjectives! So you can write “big blue truck” and you will get just that. You can basically write anything, as long it’s PG-13 and it isn’t trademarked. The game is a lot of fun, and if you are interested, there are a few titles of this series on Steam. So you have no excuse to give this series a try!

#13: Club House Games / 42 Game Classics

This game blew me off my socks. I think that this is one of the best games in it’s genre. This is how you should make a game about card and board games. I barely have anything negative to say about it.

The multiplayer is quite fun and I mostly remember this game because I played it a lot with my sister while we were young. The hours we spend on this game secretly playing this game while we are supposed to sleep. I really enjoyed those times.

I recently got this game back, since I lost my first copy. And I play it from time to time. In the present, I play this game while I’m on the train towards work. But I’m afraid that I’ll miss my station one day because I’m too addicted to this game. So, fingers crossed that it never happens.

Actually, I should write a review or something about this game. Maybe next month, since in September I will write about games I wanted to write about for a long time.

#12: Another Code: Trace Memory 

Also known as “Trace Memory” in Europe, this visual novel game is quite an overlooked gem. The story of this game touches me on personal levels. There are some things that happen in the game that make it quite memorable to me. I won’t give the details about them, since they are personal.

A while ago, I actually took a look to the sequel of this game on the Nintendo Wii. If you are interested, you can follow this link to it: Another Code – R. In this game, Ashley is on a quest to look for her father. While she is on that quest, she will unravel a mystery about her dead mother. It’s a quite thrilling story, actually.

Ashley has a sort of PDA-ish device that looked like a DS. Her father developed it. It might be an easter egg or not, it’s quite an amusing touch.

Sadly enough, the developers of this game went bankrupt. Cing made also the smash hit named Hotel Dusk. Before you ask yourself which spot that it’s going to have on the list, let me save you this disappointment. I couldn’t really get into the art style.

#11: Time Hollow

I wrote a review on this game not too long ago! I praised it enough, so you guys might have seen this entry coming.

So, the reason why this is one of my favorite games, it’s simply because the story, theme song and gameplay kept my playing until the very end.

While the game’s length is criminally short, the actual content is highly enjoyable. The soundtrack is one of the ones I have heard in a visual novel game.

That themesong, that’s the most important factor in this game. The memories that are connected to it, that’s what I gave this game such a high spot on my list. Some memories about it might be personal, but they sometimes come all back when I listen to the song. At once.

I still remember playing this game, with my back to a radiator. It was quite cold. It was in the middle of the winter and it had snowed a whole bunch. A part of the wheels of my mothers car where even stuck in the snow. But I couldn’t be bothered, I was too drawn into this gem of a game.

#10: Retro Game Challenge

xSeed, I’m sorry to hear that the sale of this game didn’t went all that good. For that reason, you couldn’t release the sequel in the west.

I urge everybody to start playing this game. If you love challenges and retro games, it’s right up your alley. If you liked games like NES Remix on Wii U, this game is something for you.

The humor, references and actually pretty accurate evolution of the video game industry… It makes for a gem of a game. I really wish it was more successful then this.

This game appears on various overlooked / underrated and top DS games, and it has every right to do so. This game has multiple games into one. And they aren’t simply mini-games, no! They are in itself full games.

They were even able to get a story into the game. Before, I sound like I’m trying to sell this game to you, I actually am. I’m not being payed by xSeed, but I think you should give them your money for this game! Or check it out at least!

End of part 2.

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