Really nice art and memorable creature designs.
About the genre: This gets called a visual novel a lot, but it's secretly a very old-school first person point and click adventure game.
I wouldn't even call it a dungeon crawler, exactly. The mini-map shows your direction within a room, but you're not able to pivot in place and usually only a hallway or crossroads can be viewed from more than one angle.
I definitely enjoyed this as more of a monster-hunting adventure game than a horror game. It IS a horror game, but it kinda feels like the point and click stuff is at odds with the horror.
Like, Death Mark is very good about not doing anything without your input. There are clearly labeled sections where you answer life-or-death questions under a time limit, but outside of those, you're free to sit and consider your next action as long as you want. That's something I really appreciate in an adventure game, but it does kinda undermine the threatening atmosphere that horror games like to cultivate.
The need to set up puzzles for the chapter-ending confrontations also limits how detailed the game is able to get when disclosing the history of the ghosts, at least until the chapter is over. Getting the good ending for each chapter depends a lot on reading between the lines of fragmentary clues and then dealing with the ghost in a way that addresses its unique history.
About the genre: This gets called a visual novel a lot, but it's secretly a very old-school first person point and click adventure game.
I wouldn't even call it a dungeon crawler, exactly. The mini-map shows your direction within a room, but you're not able to pivot in place and usually only a hallway or crossroads can be viewed from more than one angle.
I definitely enjoyed this as more of a monster-hunting adventure game than a horror game. It IS a horror game, but it kinda feels like the point and click stuff is at odds with the horror.
Like, Death Mark is very good about not doing anything without your input. There are clearly labeled sections where you answer life-or-death questions under a time limit, but outside of those, you're free to sit and consider your next action as long as you want. That's something I really appreciate in an adventure game, but it does kinda undermine the threatening atmosphere that horror games like to cultivate.
The need to set up puzzles for the chapter-ending confrontations also limits how detailed the game is able to get when disclosing the history of the ghosts, at least until the chapter is over. Getting the good ending for each chapter depends a lot on reading between the lines of fragmentary clues and then dealing with the ghost in a way that addresses its unique history.