Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo
released on Mar 08, 2023
How far would you go to bring someone back from the dead? Discover the depths that some will go to in this horror-adventure game. Set in Honjo, Tokyo's Sumida ward during the Showa period (1926-89), this is the unsettling tale of those with the power to curse, derived from the gruesome real world urban legends: "The Seven Mysteries of Honjo." Follow the cursed seven as they embark on a supernatural ordeal over a three-day period to realise their desperate hopes and dreams.
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finished the whole thing on one long plane ride and it did not disappoint. mesmerizing and rewarding for sure, if it stuck that landing a bit better it'd be perfect
lost interest, maybe i’ll pick it up again sometime soon.
PARANORMASIGHT is a mystery VN with great visual aesthetics and underwhelming story.
I love the edited photos as background imagery, the character sprites look fairly unique and are expressive enough. The menus also look great. My only complaint about the visuals is that chromatic aberration is a bit annoying and there's no way to disable it. The music is fitting though repetition got to me a bit by the end.
That being said, the presentation is probably the weakest part of the game when the writing is concerned - most of the playtime will be spent reading character's accounts on the information you are already aware of, or on the cool stuff they apparently did offscreen.
The story doesn't really have a hook or an overarching theme that would give the player a reason to care about what's going on. I have seen every ending in the game, and I still can't tell you what the story is supposed to be about. The game tells you that it's about the different perspective on resurrection, but it doesn't really explore the concept, it just uses it as a prop. Stuff just happens until the story is over. Every mystery VN has at least one Epic Twist that's supposed to recontextualize what's happened before then, and in PARANORMASIGHT you guess this twist immediately if you've played games like this before, and then the ~10 hours between the start and the end are filled with faffing about doing things that don't really tie together into a cohesive narrative.
Random meta gimmicks would've been cool, if they weren't already overdone by dozens other games that do a better job of tying them into the narrative. The game has nominally non-linear structure, but the progression through the game's story is almost entirely devoid of actual choice on the player's part: the flowchart is full of arbitrary roadblocks that force the player down the single available path.
The characters personalities are fairly weak and I don't think I could recognize most of their lines without seeing their names/sprites. Their motivations are often contrived and the game even draws its attention to it, only to handwave it with a "women be shopping" kind of remark.
The bottom line is that this VN doesn't do anything better than the other VNs with a similar focus already have done.
I recommend PARANORMASIGHT only to people who are really desperate for another fix of a story similar to Zero Escape or AI: Somnium Files.
I love the edited photos as background imagery, the character sprites look fairly unique and are expressive enough. The menus also look great. My only complaint about the visuals is that chromatic aberration is a bit annoying and there's no way to disable it. The music is fitting though repetition got to me a bit by the end.
That being said, the presentation is probably the weakest part of the game when the writing is concerned - most of the playtime will be spent reading character's accounts on the information you are already aware of, or on the cool stuff they apparently did offscreen.
The story doesn't really have a hook or an overarching theme that would give the player a reason to care about what's going on. I have seen every ending in the game, and I still can't tell you what the story is supposed to be about. The game tells you that it's about the different perspective on resurrection, but it doesn't really explore the concept, it just uses it as a prop. Stuff just happens until the story is over. Every mystery VN has at least one Epic Twist that's supposed to recontextualize what's happened before then, and in PARANORMASIGHT you guess this twist immediately if you've played games like this before, and then the ~10 hours between the start and the end are filled with faffing about doing things that don't really tie together into a cohesive narrative.
Random meta gimmicks would've been cool, if they weren't already overdone by dozens other games that do a better job of tying them into the narrative. The game has nominally non-linear structure, but the progression through the game's story is almost entirely devoid of actual choice on the player's part: the flowchart is full of arbitrary roadblocks that force the player down the single available path.
The characters personalities are fairly weak and I don't think I could recognize most of their lines without seeing their names/sprites. Their motivations are often contrived and the game even draws its attention to it, only to handwave it with a "women be shopping" kind of remark.
The bottom line is that this VN doesn't do anything better than the other VNs with a similar focus already have done.
I recommend PARANORMASIGHT only to people who are really desperate for another fix of a story similar to Zero Escape or AI: Somnium Files.
This is some of the smartest use of the ADV format I've ever seen in a visual novel, a real fusion of medium and narrative that has a satisfying conclusion to basically everything you could ask for and leave you clutching your head with how it all works out.
There are also a lot of comforting VN-isms that anyone familiar with this genre would be either ecstatic or disappointed with, up to personal preference really.
Solid characters and all sorts of awesome twists and turns that are only bogged down slightly by a couple odd puzzles and narrative choices that have with weird solutions but do have their own justification, kind of not really i'm still mad over one of the solutions to a puzzle let me be.
Definitely not the kind of game you can binge in one sitting, maybe treat it like a replacement for a tv show or a mystery book.
I hope this gets the attention it deserves and more great things come from this team (despite being under Squeenix's thumb)
There are also a lot of comforting VN-isms that anyone familiar with this genre would be either ecstatic or disappointed with, up to personal preference really.
Solid characters and all sorts of awesome twists and turns that are only bogged down slightly by a couple odd puzzles and narrative choices that have with weird solutions but do have their own justification, kind of not really i'm still mad over one of the solutions to a puzzle let me be.
Definitely not the kind of game you can binge in one sitting, maybe treat it like a replacement for a tv show or a mystery book.
I hope this gets the attention it deserves and more great things come from this team (despite being under Squeenix's thumb)
I loved most things about the game; the narrative, the creativity, (most of) the characters, I was hooked until I beat it.
Then the ending kinda lost me. It was cool how to GET to the ending, but the finale of the story left me a little unfulfilled. That's just a personal gripe though, I still think its a worthwhile experience. While some mechanics/story beats go underutilized, it makes me excited to see what this team does next
Then the ending kinda lost me. It was cool how to GET to the ending, but the finale of the story left me a little unfulfilled. That's just a personal gripe though, I still think its a worthwhile experience. While some mechanics/story beats go underutilized, it makes me excited to see what this team does next
Awesome visual novel that kind of falls apart towards the third act at least for me while I did enjoy the ending, all routes were interesting imo but does drag in the middle and gets a bit too trigger happy with unloading information onto you all at once
Starts out as a horror game that unfortunately the game dosent hold for too long as it becomes an occult detective game with a horror backdrop almost immediately that not being a bad thing
The chess match style tension that occurs when making some choices in this game are fantastic, really makes you think what you would do in the same situation, Harue Shigima being a standout character and the route I was most invested in
Fantastic artstyle and creepy vibe, hope to see Square make a follow-up someday, defintely going to go down as a cult classic if it hasnt already, extremly memorable experience and a great surprise, reminds me of those smaller DS/3ds titles that try new things
9/10
Starts out as a horror game that unfortunately the game dosent hold for too long as it becomes an occult detective game with a horror backdrop almost immediately that not being a bad thing
The chess match style tension that occurs when making some choices in this game are fantastic, really makes you think what you would do in the same situation, Harue Shigima being a standout character and the route I was most invested in
Fantastic artstyle and creepy vibe, hope to see Square make a follow-up someday, defintely going to go down as a cult classic if it hasnt already, extremly memorable experience and a great surprise, reminds me of those smaller DS/3ds titles that try new things
9/10