 
|
|
|
|
|
|
[img width=500 height=500]https://i1.wp.com/operationrainfall.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/shiin-ps4-boxart.jpg[/img]
Death Mark is a horror visual novel released in June 2017 in Japan. It was released in the West on Halloween in 2018. This game was originally released on the Playstation Vita and had later released on the Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch in Japan. When the game came to the West, the game launched simultaneously on all three of those platforms, followed by a later PC release in April 2019. A few months after this PC release the title was rebranded and became Spirit Hunter: Death Mark. Due to the confusion this could cause, the original name is being used for this review.
Death Mark was developed by Experience Inc. an obscure Japanese developer that was founded after another obscure developer named Michaelsoft went bankrupt. Michaelsoft developed a couple of Wizardry dungeon crawling spinoffs in the mid-2000s on the Playstation 2 before they folded. Until Death Mark, Experience had also only made dungeon crawlers, with their most successful game being Demon Gaze for the Vita.
Continue reading Spooky Plays: Death Mark
[img width=594 height=550]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/games/U-087/bf/U-087-S-02370-A.jpg[/img]
The Nintendo DS was a landmark handheld console. In hindsight Nintendo looks prophetic with its adoption of a touchscreen in the years just before the idea of the smartphone takes hold in the public consciousness. This touchscreen allowed many gameplay ideas that were once slow and clunky to become much smoother. Point and click adventure games are mostly known from the PC market, but there have been some ports and original point and clicks on older consoles and handhelds. The DS with its touchscreen allowed point and click adventure games to be played in the palm of everybody's hand, and there was an explosion of them. One of the early prominent developers of DS point and click adventures was the Japanese developer Cing. In 2005 they released Another Code: Two Memories, which was renamed Trace Memory for North America. In 2007 the company released Hotel Dusk: Room 215, both of these titles did quite well for the small developer. However, Cing was not able to keep this momentum rolling and went defunct in 2010.
Hotel Dusk was the first of a two part series, with its sequel being Last Window: The Secret of Cape West. Both games released on the DS, and Last Window was also Cing's final game before going bankrupt. Nintendo published all these DS titles, but part of Cing's problems may have been the seemingly random release regions of their games. Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk released in Japan, North America, and Europe and achieved some success. Last Window and Trace Memory's sequel, Another Code: R - A Journey into Lost Memories for the Wii, only released in Japan and Europe. Last Window released too late in Cing's life to likely come to North America, they were already dying when the game was releasing. What was strange about Hotel Dusk was that its first release region was in North America. So what made Hotel Dusk so special that many adventure game fans had to have it and play it? What gave it the crossover appeal to give it that little extra push?
Continue reading Hotel Dusk: Room 215
|
|
|
|
Site content Copyright © rfgeneration
.com unless otherwise noted
. Oh, and keep it on channel three
.
