Insomniac Nightmares

This last week was all about Spirit Hunter: NG. For those not aware of it, the game is a visual novel, primarily focused on hunting ghosts and surviving their “grudges” against the living; it’s the sequel to last year’s Death Mark (which has since been rebranded as Spirit Hunter: Death Mark, for some reason; don’t know why they didn’t just call this one Death Mark 2: Spirit Hunter or some such, but hey, whatever floats your boat.)

It was pretty satisfying, and like the original, was genuinely disturbing in some parts, especially when discussing the origin of the ghosts. For a couple of examples, one of the cases involves a pregnant woman who was kidnapped, had her child cut out of her by a midwife, and then left to die in the middle of a park; another involves a mentally challenged young woman with gigantism who believed her teddy bear was alive (and her little brother.) When the doll was damaged, being beheaded, she misinterpreted a local legend and began decapitating local animals, believing that if she presented them to a local shrine, it would allow her “brother” to be alive again. The townspeople turned on and murdered her.

Yeah, it’s pretty fucked up. Like the first game, the art is amazing and suits the game perfectly, with monsters who are honestly more disturbing than those found in nearly any other game with the possible exception of Silent Hill; it’s just frustrating that past chapter 1, the game blocks using the share button, so I wasn’t able to spread some of that great art around.

The trophy list wasn’t anything special, essentially entirely progression based, with a minimum of two and a half-ish playthroughs (for the “good” ending you have to resolve all the ghost’s issues and keep all your pals alive; for the “bad” ending, you have to “kill” all the ghosts – and thus, most of your friends – and for the “normal” ending, you mix and match a bit.) There’s also separate trophies for each chapter’s resolution, one for appeasing the spirit, the other for banishing it.

I enjoyed my time with the game, and again, like the first, my only complaint was I wanted more. Thankfully, from what I hear, Spirit Hunter 3 is in the works, so perhaps next Halloween we’ll get that one; it almost certainly won’t be available for Vita, but whether it’ll be PS4, PS5, or skip ’em both and just go to Switch is up in the air. We’ll see.

There was also some picking at Friday the 13th, picking up a couple of miscellaneous trophies (for calling in Tommy Jarvis 13 times and attacking Jason 13 times with a flare gun), though the rampant abuse of the systems and people’s mocking attitudes have somewhat soured me on the game. I also finally sat down and finished a playthrough of Hidden Agenda, which is a great game, even though sometimes your choices and what ends up happening seem to have vague relations at best.

Last, but not least, Yakuza 4 has finally hit the PS4, so I’ve been working on that. Mostly trying to get the assorted miscellaneous trophies out of the way, like the minigames and such, before diving into the story in earnest, but it’ll probably be mined for all the trophies I can get in the next week or so. Like most Yakuza games, I probably won’t platinum it – the goddamn shogi and mahjong hoses me every time – but also like other Yakuza titles, I’ll do my best to do everything else.

Also picked up Sekiro, Catherine: Full Body (really enjoying people telling me how problematic and transphobic I am over that one) and Code: Vein, but haven’t really delved into those, as of yet.

As always, if you want to stalk me and my progress, you can find me on PSN under Ashande or on Xbox as Typo Monster. You can also stop by my Twitch channel, where I sometimes stream my escapades. If you like what I do and want to help me keep at it, you can drop a dime in the bucket over on Patreon, as well.

What about you folks? What are you playing? Got suggestions on games or trophies I should chase after next? Drop ’em down below!