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.