Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo review – spooky goings on in Tokyo

Hark! What’s that sound? A car backfiring? A gunshot? A train collision at a crossing gate? In Paranormasight, that crashing noise, brisk but richly layered, a bit of metal to it, is the sound of understanding. It fires up the moment a character makes a connection between two disparate parts of the plot. It’s the proverbial dropping of a penny. It’s the instance of the fingerpost. Aha! But also, since this is a doomy kind of fairy tale: oh dear.

Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo reviewPublisher: Square EnixDeveloper: Square EnixPlatform: Played on SwitchAvailability: Out now on PC, Switch, iOS and Android

Paranormasight is a visual novel set in the Sumida Ward of Tokyo. We’re sometime in the past, as the telephones are old bakelite things and the TV sets still come in lacquered wooden cabinets. And we’re somewhere slightly removed from our world too. People believe strange stories and are willing to make odd leaps of logic. We are often fixed on the spot but able to turn in a neat 360 degrees, all the better to take in the environment and set ourselves up for a jumpscare. And the colours sizzle and throb slightly, drab greys and blues and sickly creams, but all lit from within, as if seen through the light of a failing 80s television tube.

I’ll get this out of the way now. I love this game. I think it’s intriguing and brilliant and haunting. And the set-up is wonderfully strange. One night in Honjo, a group of strangers are brought together by an old legend: seven tales of ancient spookiness rooted in specific parts of the neighborhood, along with vague rumours of an ancient rite that can raise the dead. But the rite is confusing – like the tales of ancient spookiness its edges and detailing have been foxed and spattered by time. And it appears the only way to trigger the rite is to commit murder?

That’s the set-up, but anything more would dip us into spoiler territory, I think. I certainly wouldn’t want to know more than this going in.

Instead, marvel at the way this ingenious game works. In many ways Paranormasight is a standard visual novel. You move between locations and between the different characters you control at different moments, prompting details of the environment to trigger streams of consciousness – what does my character think of the surroundings, of that telephone booth, of that stranger lingering in the distance? – and having lengthy multi-part conversations with the people you meet. At any point you can press a THINK button (I wish I had one in real life), that allows direct access to what the character you’re controlling has made of everything you learn. And so you rove around, a text vampire, trying to draw as many words and insights out of the environment, the moment, the people you meet, so you have more material for the puzzles and the points in the story when you have to put things together.