PARANORMASIGHT The Mermaid’s Curse Review – A Scary Sequel

I will preface this PARANORMASIGHT The Mermaid’s Curse Review by saying that I never played the prequel, so if there’s something I miss then I apologize in advance about it. Thankfully, the game opens up telling me that I don’t really need to have played the prequel to understand it since this is more of a separate investigation that bears no important relations with the one that happened in the previous game. However, I also got warned that my capacity to understand some things might be handicapped, but its nothing crucial to get the whole plot. Yes, this is a visual novel, and yes, you have to point and click.

PARANORMASIGHT The Mermaid’s Curse will definitely be one of the trickiest games I have reviewed since its very hard to talk about a game that has so many twists and turns around the corner without spoiling it so I will keep things a tad more simple this time. PARANORMASIGHT is a series of game similar to those made by Square Enix back in the day when they were just called Square Soft. Some notable games they have produced are those on the Portopia series, and there’s a ton of that identity in the PARANORMASIGHT series itself but with a more paranormal focus compared to the down to earth detective work in Portopia.

We play as Yuza Minakuchi, who is a young pearl diver who ends up finding something very odd at the depths of the sea, a doppelgänger of himself that looks extremely unsettling. After that moment a series of curses start happening at the Kameshima Island in Ise-Shima, since I’ve never been there I can’t speak about if locations were depicted with precision but one thing I have to note is that backgrounds are very good in this game. There is a very common thing in this type of games, and that is the fact that you are going to read a lot of text in PARANORMASIGHT The Mermaid’s Curse.

Gameplay in PARANORMASIGHT The Mermaid’s Curse, if we can call it that, is simply reading dialogue, and picking choices, occasionally you will have to solve some puzzles here and there but its nothing that brain-wracking like older point and click games by LucasArts such as Monkey Island. This is neat for people who wish to engage with a narrative at a quick pace and there’s also tons of quality of life features to help with the flow of the game itself. If anything, the best part of the game is how accessible it makes the visual novel experience for many, fast forwards and logs being a very important thing to have.

PARANORMASIGHT The Mermaid’s Curse is a tale about the supernatural mermaids of Ise-Shima, common yokai found in Japanese folklore and other cultures, while they aren’t really mermaids and are actually Ningyo, which literally translates to “human fish”, there is a clear connection between the yokai version and the version of our folklore. From many periods of history in Japan, Ningyo have been auguries for curses, and this game depicts them in a historically accurate place. Perhaps having some general culture knowledge about it might help elevate your enjoyment, it did for me.

While tales of mermaids in Japan date from periods as old as the 1140s, the story of PARANORMASIGHT The Mermaid’s Curse is happening in the modern day and there is a ton of characters to meet and interact with as we try to uncover the mystery of the curse happening at Kameshima, such as a treasure hunter looking for valuables, or even a housewife investigating a drowning incident that might be related to the curse and that weird doppelgänger you found, I’m doing my best to walk around all the pile of spoilers because being a visual novel twists and turns are a must.

The soundtrack in PARANORMASIGHT The Mermaid’s Curse is amazing, and it fits the mood of the game, a mysterious and foreboding tale needs to be accompanied by an equally tense melody that sets the mood for what’s in store. Be it the character interactions, that sometimes gets quite emotional, learning about characters is rather quick because information is rather easy to access, perhaps to a rather ludicrous degree you are bombarded with a ton of log entries that expand upon characters, situations, locations and even more. This is neat and all, but it really isn’t a typical thing you see in visual novel games, let alone point and click games.

It is clear that those additions are made for those who easily forget the thing they were reading, and that’s okay, but it would be neat if there was a way to turn the feature of because these notifications can get a bit annoying when you are info dumped by characters, it kinda ruins an otherwise clean UI. PARANORMASIGHT The Mermaid’s Curse feels like a game crafted for first timers in the genre, but it also does something unique to modernize it, that being the addition of mini games, the diving one being my favorite.

Finding things like the diving mini game in this genre that is often known for their massive piles of text and focus on flowing like a Choose Your Own Adventure book is a neat surprise for those who don’t particularly enjoy reading. While I’m more traditional in my tastes towards visual novels it is neat to see something different being tried out in a genre that feels to stiff and unmovable. From what I know, the first entry in the series didn’t even feature mini games, so knowing that they are taking steps to try new things is neat and leaves me wondering if a sequel to PARANORMASIGHT The Mermaid’s Curse is in the works.

And of course, Gen Kobayashi was involved in the art direction of the game and it is clear that this guy has a long range to do different kinds of illustration work. For those who don’t know him, he was involved in the creation of The World Ends with You, a very important title on the DS library that remained quite niche for a while, but ended up with a huge cult following. It is nice to see that Square Enix still seems to care about the life blood that keeps the industry running, that being the artists themselves. I will say the style of PARANORMASIGHT The Mermaid’s Curse does feel unusual for Kobayashi’s typical works.

PARANORMASIGHT The Mermaid’s Curse Review – Verdict

[Editor’s Note: PARANORMASIGHT; The Mermaid’s Curse was reviewed on PC and a copy was provided to us for review purposes.]