In the first half of 2024, I had the pleasure of completing Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, an adventure game/visual novel (published by Square Enix) that has been on my wishlist for quite some time. In Japanese the game is called パラノマサイト File 23 本所七不思議, which roughly translates to the same thing, but adds the reference to the File 23 right there in the title. What this file reveals is the key to the whole story. Anyway, a recent sale was all it took to convince me to finally give it a try. And boy oh boy, it was indeed well worth it. This is now one of my favorite games.

A cursed place

You are propelled into 80s’ Tokyo in the Sumida-ku district. Sumida is the name of the famous river that separates that quarter from the rest of the city. While a fairly nice place nowadays, this was far from being the case back in the 80s.

This place used to be called Honjo a long time ago during the Edo era. As you start the game, you play the role of a young man, waiting for his friend, Yoko, in a playground in the middle of the city. Yoko finally shows up. She’s a potential love interest for the young man. He has just met her a few weeks back and since then they sometimes hang out together.

But to be fair… she’s a little weird. She is into occult stuff and urban legends. She told you a while back that she is searching for something related to the Rite of Resurrection – a series of curses rumored to grant the power to bring back the dead. The rumors speak of ancient events that occurred in the very same Honjo quarter. Maybe one of such curses can be found in this playground, which is why she is coming back here now and then.

Horrible, tragic things happened in this area in the past, and led to the beginning of such curses. Those who can acquire such curses would be able to harness their power. Curses are said to be able to kill people, and steal their souls. With enough stolen souls, you would be able to resurrect the deceased. This sounds like an urban legend, and it might well be, but it does not cost anything to just look around with her, I guess?

The two of you wait for the night in the park, since curses can apparently only appear at night. As you wait and look around, your young friend suddenly looks terrified, pointing at something behind you. As you turn around, you search for something peculiar, but you don’t see anything. Turning back to your friend, you find her sitting on the floor, her face zombified. She’s dead. Looks nothing like something natural.

This is the beginning of a short story that will make you chase for the curses across several areas of the Honjo quarter, day after day, until you find out what these curses are really about.

An impressive cast

I’m not going to give you any spoilers, but you will end up playing several characters in the story. At the beginning, they all seem completely disconnected from each other, but as you progress you will see how all of their destinies are intertwined in subtle ways. The game is cut in separate scenes, and once you finish a scene with a specific character, you can decide to continue with that character for the next scene, or switch to one of the previous characters you have unlocked and continue their story instead. There is some degree of freedom in the order that you play, but there are some stories that need specific events to occur before you can progress.

One of the things that was far from obvious when playing, is that moving characters from a different character timeline to the same location will make them meet and will unlock a new scene. For example, character A’s timeline ends up in location X. Character B’s timeline ends up in location Y. Unless you purposely take character B to location X, they won’t get to meet character A and unlock the rest of the story. I know, it may sound OBVIOUS when I spell it out like that, but it’s not. The game feels like a Visual Novel in many aspects, and you are not typically used to be creative about how you play with characters in such games.

This trick is necessary a few times in the game, and I believe there was no clear hint about this aspect, which made me wonder what to do next when this happened for the first time. So if you ever get stuck… come back to this article.

As you can imagine, you are involved with characters who are all interested in the urban legend related to the Rite of Resurrection. Most of them for different reasons. But you can easily picture that one has to be on the verge of total despair to rely on such legends to move on. It’s a story of personal tragedies, and it will make you wonder if there’s going to be any happy end to all of this (the game features several ends).

Curse bearers meet

Since there are seven curses, there are going to be several curse bearers as well in the story. Remember, curse bearers are wandering killers. They are on the looking to steal innocent souls, and killing another soul bearer will give them even more souls at once.

So, in the different stories, such confrontations will occur, and this is where you have to find a way to protect the character you are playing. In practice, you will end up dying quite a few times until you find out the nature of the curse that ends up killing you, which is a hint on how you can avoid its effects. The devs have been quite creative on that part.

Some of the tricks to avoid a certain death are clever. Again, no spoilers.

How you experience the game

The game is non-linear in nature, so when you are playing a character, you can decide to move to different locations and see if there is anything to do in each of them. Look for clues, talk to people if such choices are available. This means looking around, and clicking on things most of the time. Once you manage to make the story progress through your actions, you unlock a new scene in the timeline, that can then start as a new mini-chapter.

In other words, it’s a traditional adventure game. But the fact that you play several characters is ultimately related to one aspect of the story that you will only understand at the very end.

A journey to the past

A visual novel, or an adventure game would be nothing without its art. In Paranormasight, everything is top-notch. The characters are not only well drawn, they are all animated when they speak (no voice over, which is a good call). There are numerous camera effects during conversations, that make them look like something out of a movie, with subtle zoom or unzoom effects. When you look around, the camera moves with you and you can investigate your 2D environment - what’s really cool is that they added a perspective effect, so that the 2D image is distorted by the perspective as you look up, down, left and right, just like when you use a 360 degrees camera.

Very, very well done, and the first game to use this kind of effect, as far as I know.

But what finishes the job is the OMG extraordinary soundtrack. It’s so good! So much of video game music is just mindless garbage elevator music slop, that you forget in a few minutes after you hear it. In Paranormasight, every scene deserves a great piece of music, to make you feel nostalgic, to make you feel tense, to make your mind wander…

It’s a mix of orchestra (violin, piano, oboe, clarinet) with regular instruments such as the guitar, and synthesizers, samplers to evoke the occult world. It’s a masterpiece in itself, composed by Iwasaki Hidenori 岩崎英則, that I have been listening to without playing the game.

An amazing journey

Paranormasight is a kind of perfect storm. It feels just right, properly designed from end to end. I almost hesitate to call it a Visual Novel, since this expression comes with all the negative connotations of the genre:

• conversations that go on forever to the point they put you to sleep
• the whole cast is composed of teenagers
• there’s always going to be some hints of something sexual in the game

Paranormasight dodges all these bullets nicely: the game is not very long (about 10 hours) and you didn’t need it to be any longer. There are a couple of schoolgirls in the story, but not everything is centered around them - the other protagonists are adults, which make for a lot more interesting set of things to talk about. The tone is definitely more serious and mature.

Steam Deck

The game was made to run on the Switch and mobile platforms during development, so it’s no surprise the game fits perfectly with the Steam Deck. You can play at the lowest TDP settings and enjoy great performance and long battery life. Controller support is excellent too, so it’s a breeze to play.

The only minor drawback is that it runs at 720p (there is no 800p mode), but that’s almost nitpicking here. Everything else is great, and the game is also fairly light in size (less than a Gb of download). As expected, the game is Verified for the Steam Deck. The rating is appropriate.

Widely celebrated

This is now a wide success worldwide, including in Japan. And nobody expected it. This game came out of nowhere, without much marketing at all, and became popular through word of mouth and great user reviews - and secured a prize at the Tokyo Games Show 2023. In April 2024, Famitsu dedicated its cover as well as a long section of their weekly magazine to Paranormasight, and interviewed some of the key persons from the development team.

They are all middle-aged Japanese men (on the older side), and I can’t say I am surprised. With this level of depth and detail, I can safely say it’s been cooking for a long time and is not the work of beginners.

In the picture above you can see from left to right: Gen Kobayashi (character designer, in the grey shirt), Takanari Ishiyama (director, in charge of the scenario as well, with the red sweater), and on the far right Kazuma Oshu (Producer, in black outfit).

The whole phenomenon extends to the real world. In August 2024, the tourism center of Sumida-ku featured real-size panels of the game’s characters in their offices.

The real Honjo

Of course, I could not end this article without going by myself to the real place described by the game, the Honjo quarter.

I went there at night to be in the right mood. And the place has some peculiar features that you don’t really see anywhere else. The Ryogoku bridge with its strange earth-like structures on each end is mesmerizing.

Nowadays there’s the Sky Tree (the tallest tower in Tokyo) that can be seen on the horizon, not far from there, but it was no there in the game as it took place in the 80s.

The area covered by the game is pretty large. It took me something like 40 minutes of walk to get from one side to the next, and going to all the areas in a circle would probably take 3 hours or so.

It was also a great opportunity to walk around while listening to the original soundtrack of the game, to be in the right mood.

As you return, you can get a nice last look at the Sky Tree over the Sumida river, before the end of the night:

That’s it. Hope you enjoyed this little trip in the area of the game.

Here’s the Steam page for the game, in case you are now tempted to try it out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2106840/PARANORMASIGHT_The_Seven_Mysteries_of_Honjo/