Square Enix has been known for their great storytelling in their RPG fantasy games such as the Final Fantasy franchise and Kingdom Hearts games. On top of the immersive stories, these games offered players a lot of visual upgrades and numerous gameplay elements to keep players engaged. PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo may not be one of these AAA games, but its use of solid storytelling held it together.
PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is a 2D horror-adventure visual novel game that puts players in the shoes of various characters who are all connected to occult tales of the “Seven Mysteries of Honjo.” Each of them is linked to a cursed power derived from the Honjo-based mysteries that have spread over the Sumida Ward of Tokyo, Japan—taking place closer to the late 20th century (aka the Showa period of 1926-89). The player must work through each story in order to uncover the ancient folklore mystery behind the curses taking over the district.
Right off the bat, I was locked in because the story picked up fairly quickly for this type of game. I have played other visual novel-style games like Doki Doki Literature Club, the Danganronpa games and the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney games. While those titles offered stunning visuals, I thought PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo was at par with them. This game seemed to have a lower budget, too, more in comparison to the latter two games I mentioned.
I loved that PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo had a lot of twists and turns in its story. It was fragmented through each character’s perspectives—really building up the tension about who was genuinely evil versus those who may actually have good intentions to use their curses.
“I loved that PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo had a lot of twists and turns in its story.”
The gameplay mechanics were fairly straightforward for both mouse and keyboard players and controller users. I preferred to play on my Xbox controller because there was a lot of backtracking in dialogue that involved countless button-mashing. There is an auto-play button in the pause menu, so dialogue could flow on its own, but button-mashing through the dialogue is pretty common for this sort of game—great to see they added the option, though.
I do not want to spoil any specific gameplay mechanics, but let us just say it took full advantage of the common features that many gamers overlook in other games. If you played Doki Doki Literature Club, then you may understand what I am talking about. I also appreciated the hints given when I inevitably had my characters die. The game implemented a hint system that offered more hints the more I kept dying on the same part.
Other notable gameplay implementations included having awesome Steam achievements and incorporating hidden collectibles. At the time of writing this, I was not able to collect all of the hidden items, but I will definitely be working on that soon.
Some of the things I would have liked to see were some better font choices, some voice acting, and maybe even some more gameplay mechanics that played around with the game’s settings and structure. While the font chosen is always clear in video games, it has been used time after time in other visual novel games.
I guess it could be more of an “if it ain’t broke” situation. I was slightly disappointed that there were no voices for each character, not even gasps or reactions. There were screams and footsteps and such, but I think having some kind of voice acting would really add some extra flavour to the game.
Regardless of whether you have played any other visual novel games, this one had its own charm. I thought the balance between the history behind The Seven Mysteries of Honjo and the horror worked well. I learned a lot more about some famous Japanese spirits, folklore and myths.
For only $19.99, I enjoyed the experiences in Square Enix’s PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo. It took me about 7 to 8 hours to complete—I will admit I was stumped for a while on one part. I definitely recommend it for those into visual novel games. It can be the perfect horror game to play along with friends or on one’s Twitch stream for some nice scary content.
