Adventure Corner ~ Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse

Welcome to Adventure Corner, a column where members of the RPGamer staff can give their thoughts, impressions, and pseudo-reviews for various adventure titles that don’t come under our usual coverage. Adventure Corner is aimed at delivering opinions on a wide range of titles including visual novels, point-and-click adventures, investigative mysteries, and so forth.

In this edition of the column we take a look at Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse, the second title in Square Enix and Xeen Inc.’s supernatural horror mystery series.

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse

2023’s Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo was an unexpected hit. Its dark supernatural mystery set in a version of 1980s Tokyo provided a tangle of threads that was enthralling and immensely satisfying to sift through. Square Enix and Xeen Inc. have followed-up it up with Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse. Although the sequel is less dark in tone, focusing a bit more on mystery than outright horror, it nonetheless provides a fascinating and thoroughly engaging tale, very much leaving a desire for further mysteries to solve in the future.

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse takes place a year after the events of The Seven Mysteries of Honjo in the Mie Prefecture’s Ise-Shima peninsula region. It is centred around the island of Kameshima, as mermaid folklore, historical curses, and the possibility of immortality combine to create the potential for tragedy. There’s no room for supernatural skepticism here; although it doesn’t have any direct connections and players will still be able to follow events easily enough, the game largely assumes that players are familiar with the general themes of curses and the reality that the supernatural exists, giving a warning that playing the first game will help players understand and get to grips with things.

Except for the returning Storyteller, Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse features a wholly new cast.

The game begins with Yuza Minakuchi and his friend Azami Kumoi going on a diving expedition. Yuza lost both of his parents and Azami lost his father in a storm five years ago. Having left Kameshina, Yuza decides to return and become an ama diver, which serves as the introduction to the game’s story as events take place both before and after it. Like The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, the game quickly branches out into separate paths following four separate viewpoint protagonists, including a foreign occult author hunting for mermaids and a paranormal investigator with the police. While the story is non-linear, players aren’t really put at pains to try and figure out the ordering of events, as the story chart readily slots scenes into their correct order as players are unlocked. Instead, players largely view events in an order that steadily feeds new information to them, so while viewpoint characters may know things ahead of time, they only get revealed to the player when it becomes relevant to what they know and have witnessed. However, there are times when information given earlier, either directly in conversation or through the extensive in-game files that accumulate as the game goes on, become important for answering specific questions.

The Mermaid’s Curse is a bit more focused on the mystery than the direct threat of the curses that were a major part of The Seven Mysteries of Honjo. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of murder in the game; there absolutely is, but by and large there are fewer times where players are in immediate direct danger. The protagonists are a lot less corruptible, with players having much fewer chances to use any curses themselves. It does give the game a more consistent balance, and the actual mystery itself is no less fascinating, but there’s not quite the same sense of dread as in the first game. The way information is gradually revealed to the player as all of the events start to fit together is very clever. There’s a lot of pleasure to be had in figuring out all of the small pieces of the overall puzzle, while being safe in the knowledge that there’s still a lot more to come as everything eventually slides into place in an incredibly pleasing manner.

As players progress, they unlock more events in the Story Chart.

Aiding the mystery is the high quality of the writing and localisation, and similar to the first game, it makes excellent use of Japanese history and folklore for its tale. The characters are all memorable and have their own distinct quirks, motivations, and connections to other cast members, with the protagonists being likable in different ways. The various reveals help add context to their decisions and behaviour throughout the game, with all the characters ably filling their various roles and maintaining strong interactions throughout. The game helps by highlighting key phrases in conversations to guide players, but the writing does a fine job on its own at providing hints and reactions to keep players clued in.

The game is usually happy to supply hints if it feels the player needs them, but is also good at making the player feel a sense of accomplishment when they do manage to find any answers or solutions entirely by themselves. Players will need to keep on top of the various informational files that the game keeps hold of, as many of the answers to questions are nestled within them. Having a good memory for information certainly helps, but everything that players will need to progress is made readily available to them at all times, even if it necessitates a bit of manual searching for the exact bit of detail needed. Like The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, the fourth wall and meta elements play a not insignificant part in impacting how everything plays out, giving the player further attachment to the events and characters. One addition is a diving mini-game, which plays an important role at the beginning and at another certain part of the story, though it otherwise acts as a short optional diversion and as a goal for certain achievement hunters.

Like the first game, it features a mix of conversational puzzles, interactive elements, and answer inputs.

There’s no voice acting in the game, but it never feels like it’s missing it; the sound and visual design do more than enough to evoke the atmosphere and characters’ reactions to conversations and events. The game’s art style features great and memorable character designs from Gen Kobayashi and is pleasing to look at and immersive, with the 2D characters blending very well against the backgrounds. Hidenori Iwasaki’s score is also excellent, providing a good mix of atmospheric, emotional, and catchy tracks that further complement the situations they are used in, with the various score effects also working to heighten the atmosphere. The presentation never attempts to be flashy or impress on its own accord, but does exactly what it needs to do to get the most out of the game’s mystery.

It’s very pleasing to see that the reception to the first game was enough to make it a series, and more pleasing still to see how Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse has turned out. Offering a slightly different atmosphere helps it stand out on its own while still very much taking on the fascinating mystery and puzzle elements that made the first game so enjoyable. With its own distinct set of memorable twists and characters, the game offers a thoroughly engaging tale that is immensely pleasurable to work through, and I can only hope for more in the future.

Disclosure: This article is based on a free copy of the game provided by the publisher.