Shiin is a horror adventure game centered around the protagonist, Yashiki, dealing with what are known as Marks. When a human interacts with an evil spirit, a strange scar known as a Mark appears somewhere on their skin. Mark bearers slowly forget things and then ultimately die. Yashiki ends up at the Kujou mansion having forgotten most everything. Upon entering he discovers that the family head, Saya, was investigating the Marks. Unfortunately for him, she died before she could properly deal with hers. However, he does learn that the only way to get rid of a Mark is to defeat the spirit that created it, but due to his lack of memories he has no idea where to begin in searching for the spirit that gave him his Mark. Thus, he ends up working with a number of other Mark bearers in order to defeat all the evil spirits that come to his attention, with the hope that he’ll defeat the spirit that gave him his Mark in the process.
This game has six chapters, with five being a part of the main story and the sixth being an extra that was originally DLC, though it has been included by default in subsequent releases. Each chapter involves investigating a spirit in order to find out their background and thus the origin of the hatred that caused them to become an evil spirit. With that knowledge and items collected while searching, the player can either destroy the spirit or save it, each option resulting in a short story branch until the start of the next chapter. In order to get the good ending to the overall game, every spirit must be saved.
In terms of the main story, the writing on the individual cases felt very hit or miss. The first I suppose had the benefit of being completely new, and thus it felt the most interesting and exciting. The way the mystery behind the spirit was slowly revealed was handled well. The second felt pretty drawn out to the point it got kind of annoying and the mystery wasn’t that great. The third’s mystery was really simple but it flowed well. The fourth barely had a mystery, but did a great job at being really creepy. The fifth was pretty solid in terms of its mystery and atmosphere for the most part. However, the fifth was also where the overarching plot reached a conclusion. And that was really weak, being pretty rushed and the twists in general not being all that shocking. As a payoff to the overarching plot threads that had been building up since the beginning of the game, it was disappointing.
The biggest problem with the writing was how it handled it’s cast. For the most part, the supporting characters were only present in a single chapter and on top of that they weren’t fleshed out at all beyond their involvement with spirits. Yashiki wasn’t really handled all that well either. Despite the writing being in first person, it didn’t really providing insight into him or his thinking process at all. As a result he just seemed really dull. The story of spirits was handled somewhat better, in that their background got fleshed out to a decent degree. However, I feel the goal of this was to get the player to sympathize with the spirit, and I feel it was only really successful at that in the third chapter. As such it was hard to get all that invested in anyone, and thus hard to get invested in the plot overall.
The sixth chapter was a noticeable improvement over the previous five. The mystery was pretty interesting and it flowed better than any of the previous chapters. Furthermore, Yashiki actually gets fleshed out somewhat. There’s a lot of returning characters from previous chapters. And the spirit is well written enough to be pretty easy to sympathize with. It feels like the first five chapters were pretty unpolished, but they finally got it right with the sixth. This chapter also seems to be building up to the sequel, so overall it’s a great final chapter that leaves a pretty good impression of the overall game and makes me want to pick up the next entry.
Gameplay wise, it was pretty rough. Thankfully, the game does have a backlog, but it is missing a lot of the other standard features you would find in visual novels, such as controlling the text speed. What’s especially annoying is that unlike most visual novels where if you click again while the text is still appearing and it appears instantly, here you just have to wait for the text to slowly come in. The engine can apparently handle making text instantly appear as in certain parts of the game you can make the text instantly appear by pressing again, but for the majority of the game you bizarrely can’t. Selecting between different choices also felt kind of sluggish, which is especially annoying considering that they’re timed choices, though I suppose you have enough time that the timed element never really matters.
Exploration wise, it’s standard point and click but you can’t change the cursor speed and it moves pretty slowly. Moving around is somewhat like a first person dungeon crawler, but kind of disorienting because certain rooms have multiple views while others do not. Thus, sometimes when you enter a room it’ll change what way you’re facing, which can be annoying when you’re trying to move around quickly. The game also has bizarre boss battles where you generally have to assign characters different items for multiple rounds to weaken the spirit before you can finally use the actual item you want to use to defeat it. These felt pointlessly drawn out. The chapters that just involved making a few choices instead worked a lot better.
The art in the visual novel is great, though it’s clear that it was suffering major budget constraints. There aren’t as many CGs as I would expect from a visual novel like this. I did appreciate how there was a CG gallery though, as far too often games like this are missing one. There also weren’t enough sprite variants, and thus it had to use extreme emotional sprites even when expressing pretty light emotions. There was also essentially no voice acting in the main game, though there was a noticeable increase in chapter 6. The soundtrack was pretty solid, though somewhat generic. There were a few typos and bugs, such as character profiles not updating properly in the last chapter, but nothing too egregious.
Also, there are extra voice dramas that are absent in the English version but were included in the Japanese release that you can find the translation for on Youtube. They flesh out Yashiki and Saya a bit better though they don’t have anything too major. There’s also a separate drama CD that was also fan translated but I think that includes spoilers for the sequel VN.
A horror adventure visual novel with some interesting concepts and good art but somewhat weak writing and low production values.
7/10
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