I often think about Paranormasight, the excellent mystery game from Square Enix that takes place in the old quarter of Honjo in Tokyo. It’s mesmerizing in many ways - and I talked about it at length in my prior review. I highly recommend it if you have not tried it yet.

A few weeks ago, I had another reason to go back to the Honjo quarter. There was a special event where they sold goods derived from the game for a limited time. How did I know about that? Well, I stumbled upon a post on X by pure chance mentioning it ONCE, and I guess the next thing was to make plans to go there.

I don’t usually buy game related goods (I buy games instead), but I like the art of the game so much that I had to make an exception. So here I was, taking the JR line, passing by the Ryogoku station and stopping at the Kinshijyo (錦糸町) station. Heading out of the south exit, I walked to the Marui store, jumped into an elevator to reach the 7th floor where the event space was supposed to be. As I exited the elevator, there were nothing but restaurants around.

OK, is this the right place? Did I make a mistake? I decided to walk the floor at least once, from one end to the other to make sure there was nothing I was missing.

As I walked down the aisle, I passed pizzerias, food chains, and a few Japanese restaurants as well. I turned a corner, leading to other kinds of shops - Still no Paranormasight in sight… I was about to turn back when I got a glimpse of a poster from far away that looked familiar.

Sure enough, that was it!

As expected the space was fairly small. Maybe a 10m by 20m room. Yet, it was well arranged and pleasant to visit. You entered the place with real-size cardboard replicas of the characters of the game, inviting you in.

On the walls were attached a bunch of posters and artworks derived from the game. Sadly, the posters were not for sale. That’s a real shame, because some of them are REALLY good.

In the center, you had all the goods available on shelves, ordered by type. The really cool items were the (resin) replicas of the curse stones. As expected, the fish curse, the one you get first in the game, was sold out. It also happens to be of the most cool looking ones. Apart from the curses, you had decks of regular playing cards, stickers, pins, and more small stuff related to the game characters.

It was a great time to get cool looking t-shirts with Richter, one of the most memorable characters of the game.

At the back, the organizers put a white board for visitors to leave comments and messages. Hopefully the developers will read them at some point.

If you can’t read Japanese, you could see some comments such as “congrats for the 2 years anniversary!”, “Thank you for Richter!”, “Congrats, please buy a lot of things!”, “I’m waiting for it to turn into a series!”, and more along the same lines.

The other side of the wall had some more artworks, with character design boards. The kind of things you only see in artbooks.

Continue further and you could find some pages of the manga derived from Paranormasight. This is Japan after all, and once something is successful in one medium, it takes no time to transfer to another.

In one corner of the room, the Narrator was keeping an eye on the visitors, with his faithful TV by his side.

I had my own look at the visitors too. I didn’t expect a crowd, and there was none indeed. A few folks came alone, a few couples, and small groups of women also enjoyed a visit. I got the feeling there were more female visitors on average - not sure if it’s a surprising thing. A visual novel with a mystery and a strong cast of female characters is bound to find a larger, wider audience.

One thing was however obvious: there were no teenagers or kids. It was really an adult audience, which is exactly the target for this game. Even though it’s available on Switch (as download only), this is clearly not a game for 10 years olds.

I did buy quite a few things in the end, so I’m happy with my visit.

The real question is, will there be some kind of follow-up to the game? I don’t necessarily mean a sequel, but I hope the great, talented cooks have another great title cooking in their kitchen.