I’ve always admired how Japanese adventure games manage to combine lots of elements and different gameplay ideas into something that looks and feels quite consistent and stylish. That said, I also always disliked the tendency of these games to overexplain plot points, require you to click on literally every tiny thing on the scene before allowing you to proceed with the story and, if they have lots of potential story timelines in the chart/timeline, being grindy about it. So I was a bit cautious about Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo because I’ve enjoyed far fewer games of this sort than I’ve tried. Luckily, this one is genuinely fun.
As mentioned, Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is a Japanese adventure game with the UI and presentation most commonly associated nowadays with Visual Novels and it does indeed have a Story Chart with multiple possible timelines and endings. However, after a relatively long prologue, which feels like it is implying a very Virtue’s Last Reward “hunt all timelines” approach, the game mostly drops that and proceeds as a proper story-driven horror themed adventure, where you want to make smart choices and succeed, not die a bunch of times for the sake of completion.
The premise is very simple – for some occult reason, there are curses tied to curse stones that materialized in the world and each of the curse stone bearer is motivated to kill other curse bearers (and normal people too) to get enough resources to perform a Rite of Resurrection. Each curse is unique in how it works, all of them are deadly and you will be trying to survive while investigating this whole mystery from several playable perspectives. Detectives, smart schoolgirls and big conspiracies are included. The game also immediately establishes that it’s not shy to use some meta elements, which made me worried as it’s very easy to misuse, but the game is pretty smart about it. Don’t expect hardware-based inventiveness of, say, 999 or Hotel Dusk puzzles, of course, but when things like this pop up, they’re mostly well designed.
Game mostly avoids the typical pitfalls of the genre that I’ve described. The storytelling is well paced, most of the time, the Story Chart is not a convoluted mess, you don’t use it as often as in, say, AI: The Somnium Files. There were only a couple of moments, where game expected me to click on every interactable pixel for seemingly no reason before letting me go on – usually it’s far more intuitive (though investigating everything is rewarded with lore information or collectibles). The characters aren’t too ridiculous, even when they’re approaching that limit, the story is good, the problems you have to solve are interesting. And depending on if you’ve played games like this before or not, the experience will range from familiar but fun, to astonishing.
If you have never really played games like this before – this is actually a very good starting point. And if you like Japanese adventure games, Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is a very good example of one and I hope to see more titles in a similar style from the team behind this project.