listen! what is that sound Car backfire? Gunshots? Trains colliding at intersections? In Paranormasight, that colliding sound, brisk but rich in layers, a bit metallic, is the sound of understanding. It kicks in when the characters make a connection between the two different parts of the plot. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. This is an instance of a bar. aha! And, because it’s a fairy tale of doom: oh dear.
Paranormasight is a visual novel set in the Sumida district of Tokyo. We are sometime in the past, as the telephones are old bakelite and the televisions are still housed in painted wood cabinets. And we’re also slightly out of our world. People believe weird stories and are willing to make weird logical leaps. We’re often stuck in place, but able to turn a neat 360 to better blend in with the environment and prepare ourselves for a jump kill. The colors hissed and fluttered slightly, drab grays and blues and sickly creams, but all lit from within, as if seen through the light of a malfunctioning 80s TV tube.
I’ll fix that right now. I love this game. I think it’s funny, it’s brilliant, and it’s memorable. And the setup is very strange. One night in Honjo, a group of strangers is brought together by an ancient legend: seven tales of ancient ghosts rooted in specific nearby regions, and vague rumors of an ancient ritual that can bring the dead back to life. But the ritual is confusing — like an old ghost story, its edges and details have been stained by time. Seems like the only way to trigger the ritual is murder?
That’s the setup, but I think any more would put us in spoiler territory. Of course I don’t want to know more.
Instead, marvel at how this ingenious game works. In many ways, Paranormasight is a standard visual novel. You move between different locations and different characters you control, and at different moments, prompting details of the environment to trigger the stream of consciousness – what does my character have about its surroundings, that phone booth, that stranger wandering in the distance view? – Hold lengthy multi-part conversations with people you meet. At any point you can press a THINK button (I wish I had one in real life), which allows direct access to the character you control’s perspective on everything you’ve learned. So you wander around, a literal vampire, trying to suck as much text and insight as you can from the circumstances, the moments, the people you meet, so that when you have to put together the puzzles and points of the story, you have More material stuff together.
But what I especially love here is how Paranormasight keeps changing perspectives from one character to another, creating an incredible sense of tension with the spooky scenes and short time frames. And that tension almost always comes from information. Who knows something that I don’t? Who doesn’t know what I just learned? Where can I go and who can I talk to to uncover the missing parts of the story that I don’t know? This is a game where everything can matter–not just your character, but the exact time you arrive at a new location. At the same time, all of this information is highly subjective. Two characters arriving on the same side street react to it differently in different ways: an upper-class lady repressed by the shudder of being so close to poverty, a seasoned policeman contemplating the potential impact of such a cramped location. what it means to be a witness.
As you get deeper into the narrative, that kind of thinking circles outward, because at the end of the day, the mystery here is one of motivation. Given the chance to gain amazing powers, what are the people you meet and travel with on this particular night and the sickly gray days that follow – what do these people really want? What are they willing to do to make this wish come true? Is there anyone in the cast who might have wanted a little more?
What a game. A tangle of motives, memorable characters, some of whom slyly subvert stereotypes, moments of whimsy, and static art with a special gift for the eyes and the way eyes can reveal inner life make motives all the more exciting. people. And that setting! One night, a gray, dry day in Tokyo, the buildings are transparent walls of bleached concrete, the sky gridded by power lines, phone lines, and a network of all information.
Lots of games are dying to be played on TVs these days – show me a Sony first party game that doesn’t have a Prestige Telly atomizer. Paranormasight reminds me of a very different kind of television. It’s the 1990s, it’s on BBC 2 at around 11:30, you click because you can’t sleep, and there’s some weird, niche music that no one at school has heard or seen. But you give it five minutes and after that you can’t let go.
Well, Paranormasight is a joy. A mystery, a puzzle and a ghost story that is actually haunted by the player on the other side of the screen.
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