Spirit Hunter: Death Mark II for Playstation 5

If you like horror visual novels this will definitely hit the spot. Picking up a few months after the first game: Death Mark you are faced with new and more dangerous spirits.

TL;DR - (They threw a lot of new things at the wall to see what would stick and while some did fall off, what remains still makes for an enjoyable little investigation game - more so if you have knowledge of the lore of the previous entries or are willing to dip in to it a bit before playing.)I love this series enough to admit that it is a VERY acquired taste, and that this is - at least narratively - the weakest entry, but that's balanced off nicely by how many quality of life features they poured in to make this much smoother to play than before. The playstyle has been changed from first person, Myst-lite object searching and puzzle solving to a side scrolling adventure game like The Coma series. You could argue that this detracts from the in-your-face quality of the scares, particularly since you aren't ever chased by anything or have to hide, but it still switches to first person for spirit confrontations, this game's boss fights.If you are new to the series an obvious question would be if you can hop into this game without having played the original or the side story, NG. It may seem like a cop-out but the answer is both yes and no: the main story arc has next to no connection to the events in Death Mark 1 but most of the main cast in Death Mark 2 are returning party members from the first game, and there are enough in-jokes and references to "the events four months ago" that it would make the experience far more engaging to at least watch a playthrough of the original if you just can't bring yourself to deal with the slight jank of an obscure six year old visual novel.That brings me to a major content warning though, and why I can never recommend this series to any friends in good faith: on top of this game featuring some truly gory death CGs (that you can censor in the settings), one of those recurring in-jokes from the first title regards fan service scenes (that you can NOT censor) that the developers saw fit to throw in at strange and very unsexy moments. They could possibly ruin the game for you if you can't bring yourself to laugh it off as the campy nonsense it is - there really isn't much difference from all the teenage snogging in Halloween or Friday the 13th, but Death Mark isn't a slasher movie and it's hard to recover that sense of supernatural dread after boobs in your face, ghostly or not. Be warned!As mentioned, the overall story is weaker than the previous two games, which were a collection of distinctive ghost stories and locations connected by an overarching death curse or Apex Predator Ghost to keep things moving forward. Death Mark 2 occurs in one main location with the other haunts serving more like mini-bosses between you and the Even Ghostier Ghost at the end, but they don't add much to the story in terms of development or even clues to fight the Ghostliest Ghost because over half the clues you receive turn out to be red herrings or hallucinations the Most Ghost inflicted on you, making you feel like you wasted all your time while people are dying horribly all around you. That being said this is one of few franchises to feature an older, otherwise capable male protagonist at the complete mercy of a female aggressor who can warp his perception of reality whenever she wants, so while the haunts and story beats in the middle act tend to miss the mark, that overall psychological horror REALLY hits when it finally cranks into high gear.