Some of my favorite games of all time are visual novel hybrids, such as the Somnium Files, Zero Escape, and Danganronpa games. My absolute favorite feature in games is fourth-wall breaking, especially in horror games; when the horror breaks out of the game into real life, that’s when I really start to feel the rush (such as in Pony Island, Inscryption, Until Dawn, Doki Doki Literature Club, and The Stanley Parable). In the first hour of Xseed’s new horror visual novel Paranormasight, I was excited that this might be the game to combine two of my great loves in an interesting new way. Unfortunately, while the story is intriguing and presents some cool timeline hopping that can only exist in a video game, the few amazing moments when it capitalizes on breaking the fourth wall are diluted by unbelievable swaths of repeated and rehashed text.
The premise of Paranormasight is actually very intriguing on its own, and could probably serve as the basis for a much more exciting horror movie or TV Show. In the sleepy town of Honjo, Japan, nine curses placed on the town thousands of years ago appear again one night, each inspired by a local mystery passed down as urban legend. They range anywhere from very exciting to very droll; one claims a giant demon foot appeared in a bathhouse demanding to be washed while another is about a guy who thought he heard clappers once but no one was there. I like how each of these legends feels like a very real urban myth that you might hear around your own small town, and I quite like that the myths are referred to as the Seven Mysteries of Honjo even though there are nine of them and no one can explain why. It’s just the kind of thing that’s dumb enough to happen in real life. Out of curiosity, I checked in on the real life city of Honjo in the Saitama Prefecture via Google Street View to see if these locations were real. They very much are, and that explains why the city in the game world felt so well realized.
Each of these nine curses are sealed into a curse stone, which each appear to a person in Honjo one night with a message: if the curse bearer is able to kill enough people to fill up the curse stone with souls, those souls may be traded for the life of one deceased person in a ritual called the Rite of Resurrection. Each curse needs specific conditions to be met before it can automatically kill someone, and those conditions are known only to the curse bearer. Essentially, each of these nine individuals has a super power that can instantly kill another person if a condition is met, and the player will have to live through multiple timelines to figure out who has what curse and how each one works. Like I said, very interesting premise.
The themes of Paranormasight center around the value of life in relation to how much you care about it. Do you commit cold-blooded murder on people you consider less valuable in exchange for a person you consider more valuable? Do you cast the stone away because you could never possibly take a life, not even for the person you love the most in the world? Do you try any sort of trickery and deception you can to steal the souls needed without getting your hands dirty to keep a clean conscience? It’s an interesting question that I think bears some thought, especially in how it’s presented in the five endings. A few of the endings had such convoluted routes to reach that I had to consult a guide, which confirmed that the logic was so nonsensical I would never, ever have been able to reach them without help.
You’ll follow around a series of characters in multiple timelines, including but not limited to a mid-level salaryman at a soap company, a grizzled veteran detective, a grieving mother, and a determined schoolgirl, and live out dozens of different scenarios involving the curse stones that fateful night. This setup is hard not to compare to Zero Escape, where you as the player hopping around timelines and gathering information is canonical to the lore of the story, but unlike Spike Chunsoft’s masterpiece thriller it fails to deliver on the strong foundation it lays. The story is framed by an old man who speaks directly to you as the player, advising you on some of the rules of the world of Paranormasight and giving hints about when things can or should be tried a new way. Perhaps you should try a different dialogue choice in a conversation, or choose a new destination to travel to. Early on in Paranormasight, I encountered an obstacle that was only beatable by me as a player breaking the fourth wall and directly adjusting game and control settings to outwit an enemy. This blew my mind and sparked a great excitement in me. Unfortunately, this kind of event only happened twice more over the course of the ten hour game.
Speaking to the length, I have to say that while most of it is mesmerizingly enticing and very well written, Paranormasight far outstays its welcome. The biggest issue is that while timeline-hopping, the player ends up re-reading a lot of dialogue. Like a lot of it. There is no “skip read text” button as there is in similar kinds of games, which is extremely frustrating. My thumb is still sore from mashing the A button over and over again. The other issue is that a lot of the second half of the game is largely the different characters meeting for the first time in many configurations and rehashing to each other the same information the player already has. It’s quite tedious once you realize that entire chapters are useless and reveal no new info to the player – they could easy have been fade out and in situations. While I was riding high for the first few hours, the second half of Paranormasight was a major let down.
One other minor annoyance is that Paranormasight maxes out at 1080p on PC. My 1440p monitor had to upscale it to match the size, making the picture blurry. While it didn’t really take away from my enjoyment, I’m startled because since I started PC gaming in 2015 this is the very first game I’ve come across that does not have a 1440p resolution setting. It’s a simple thing but it feels oddly lazy when a huge amount of PC gamers are using 2560×1440 resolutions, if not higher. Then again, this is published by Square Enix, and I’ve learned to expect low quality from their PC ports as of late. I also had a bug a few times where the game continued to register the movement of the cursor but wouldn’t let me click on any buttons, but closing and restarting the game fixed that.
I enjoyed a lot of Paranormasight, and I think I’d have a much higher opinion of the game if it didn’t insist on rehashing the same plot to me over and over to pad out the play time. The music is great, the art is nice, and the script is really well written. With such an interesting premise this could have been a big hit for me, but, alas – it wasn’t meant to be. I do still recommend Paranormasight for any visual novel fans out there; however, the lacking execution is not going to allay the concerns the wider gaming audience has with the genre.
Nirav reviewed Paranormasight on PC with his own bought copy. The game is also available on Nintendo Switch, Android, and iOS.
