PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is a visual novel that doesn’t play by the usual rules of the genre.
Sometimes a game comes along that shakes up the formula of an established genre and it’s a great thing to see. It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does happen, it can be a sight to behold, and that’s why it’s great to know that PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo manages to accomplish that. This is a great thing because most visual novels are somewhat lacking in the whole gameplay department, but this particular visual novel manages to shape it up enough.
PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is, firstly, a game with a title that is far too lengthy. This seems to simply be a trend among some Japanese games, and especially Square Enix because all you need to do is look at the variety of ridiculous names that the Kingdom Hearts games have managed to exhibit to know that this is the case. In addition, this particular game, with its unwieldy title, is also by Square Enix. So, perhaps that explains it.
So, what about the game itself? Why does it do things differently from most visual novels? Well, when you pick up most visual novels, they are fairly static things. Some visual novels are even purely static. It’s a book that you read by clicking a screen and there are no choices or gameplay elements to speak of, but these are less common than the more involved yet minimal gameplay-oriented other variety.
The other variety of visual novels entails mostly reading what characters have to say while clicking through their dialogue and then, occasionally, getting to do something a little different like making a choice. One of the biggest contributors to this form in the Western world is the works of Christine Love, like Analogue: A Hate Story, Ladykiller in a Bind, and especially Get in the Car, Loser! Although that last one is hardly a visual novel any longer.
So, most visual novels do not much experiment. They allow you to click through and then sometimes make binary choices that can mildly change things here and there. It’s not very engaging and mostly a disappointing affair for those who want something, anything that provides more engagement. So, for those who do want some more engagement, PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is here for you.
PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo has far higher production values than the vast majority of visual novels ever manage to provide their players. Now, this still doesn’t mean that the game is as freeing as many other genres, but it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be a narrative experience that tightly controls how you can and cannot interact with it. It is not an open-world RPG where you can go wherever you want.
What you can do is look around, investigate your environment, gather clues that may help you with your next puzzle or obstacle, and the game also makes use of a strong focusing technique. The backgrounds are somewhat faded and blurred as if they’re viewed through a filter. This gives everything an eerie look that works well with what PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is trying to do. It’s trying to be a paranormal experience, but what this blurred effect does in practice is that it aids you in spotting the things that stick out in the environment. It’s a subtle way to help the player see what they need to see.
Other than that, the game is fairly standard in its basic presentation. You spend most of the time talking to people, but because of the focus on gathering clues around you and trying to understand what to do next, you never feel as if it plays out in a standard way. The conversations in PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo form part of the puzzles. The conversations aren’t simply there to get you whatever exposition you need to get to progress the narrative but are usually clues that can aid you in what you need to do next.
Sometimes you need to find items in the environment that can be used, sometimes you need to look around to know what to talk about, and sometimes you also just may want to look around and find the collectables that are scattered around the game’s scenes, although this one is less necessary. The main reason that you’re often trying to find all this information is that you’re often doing two things at once: trying not to die and trying to find out how to kill other people.
PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo provides you with a lot of information, and some of that information comes from simply looking around, and some of it comes from the extensive collection of files that the game provides you with, and those files often aid you in determining what needs to be done to perform or escape murders. The murders are integral to the central narrative that intermingles with the gameplay.
Now, before proceeding, there will be no real spoilers ahead, and any minor spoilers will be minor but also preempted with a spoiler warning. So, the game’s central narrative involves you playing as one of several Curse Bearers. These are people who have some kind of a curse that they can project onto others to kill them.
So, an immensely minor spoiler warning here as it happens in the first few minutes of the game, the first protagonist can kill people who turn their back on him. So, you spend much of the early game trying to find the other Curse Bearers so that you can try and get them to turn their backs on you so that you can kill them.
During all this, you’re also trying not to fulfil the conditions of their curse. Let’s make up an example so that we don’t spoil any of the real ones, as they do form part of the puzzle structure of the game. Imagine that one of the Curse Bearers has a curse that can strike a person with lightning whenever that person uses the word “lightning.” This strange circumstance is the thing that you then need to avoid as that particular Curse Bearer may try to guide the conversation in such a way that you use that word and then die.
This also means that you’ll probably die quite often until you’ve learnt some of these curses and their conditions, and this is where another narrative element enters the scene. PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is an immensely meta-narrative-oriented game. Whenever you die, a mysterious character reminds you that you can try again, but that the player knows things that the character doesn’t. So, you can make the player do things that seemingly don’t make sense without this kind of special knowledge. This is a kind of dramatic irony-based gameplay that isn’t generally seen made explicit in a game.
It can be argued that the way you repeatedly come back to fight bosses in Bloodborne or Elden Ring while adopting strategies you’ve learnt from dying repeatedly is arguably something metatextual. However, it’s never made an explicit part of the narrative where a character literally talks to you, the player, about it.
Each of these Curse Bearers and their stories intersects with one another and form part of the whole. The game itself is structured around a series of short scenes that can be played and replayed as much as desired. In addition, each timeline can also interrupt other timelines and distort them. It’s essentially a kind of non-linear presentation that is ultimately a linear narrative when you realize what it’s doing, but it’s still quite a ride while it happens. This was done in a very different game from last year called Beacon Pines, but the tone in PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is considerably darker.
Each of these short scenes involves trying to understand the mysteries that have led to these curses in the first place and how to get the ultimate reward that comes from having this ability to curse others. The reward at the end of this dark rainbow is the Rite of Resurrection. The Curse Bearer who manages to several of the other Curse Bearers can attain a chance to resurrect someone, or so the legend goes. PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is all about legends and folktales.
If you want a game that bombards you with a lot of Japanese culture that requires you to read through a lot of information, then PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is the game for you. In addition, the narrative focus on killing everyone else to attain a special reward is a very Japanese narrative. There are loads of manga and anime out there, like the Future Diary manga/anime and the Eden of the East anime, that have that as a central plot. So, the basic idea is not necessarily all that original, but it is superb in its presentation.
This fairly standard basic narrative conceit is a good baseline onto which PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo plants an occult fixation and the ability to murder people if they do anything at all that matches the conditions of your curse. The whole thing is also very anime, and the visuals present that too. In addition, while there are certainly far higher production values at play here, they still aren’t too intensive. There are no spoken lines, and most scenes involve static or barely animated characters, but it doesn’t need to be more than that.
Furthermore, the sound design in PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is both good and peculiar. Let’s start with why it’s good. Whenever something becomes an important part of the narrative, such as an important moment or piece of information, there’s a slowdown and a noise that draws your attention towards it. The game is mostly text that you click through, and when a game is like that, it can become easy for your eyes to gloss over as you passively absorb information until something important happens, and this highlights that importance.
The other thing about the sound design, the thing that is more peculiar than anything, is that there are many sound effects for clicking on menus and such that are strangely reminiscent of the 1999 game Dino Crisis. This may be entirely imagined, but it’s a very particular sound effect that is a very old kind of sound effect to use in a game in the modern era. However, that does not stop PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo from using it.
Lastly, despite stating that PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is a game that mixes things up a lot for the visual novel genre, and it certainly does do that, it isn’t necessarily revolutionary in how it does this. Instead, it’s a novel changeup that is appreciated, but it does still ultimately entail clicking on everything until you’ve clicked on everything. It’s far more involved than the vast majority of visual novels, but in terms of other genres, it isn’t that involved.
Ultimately though, PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is a great example of the visual novel genre and an immense step up from many other versions of this style of gameplay. It has a great story, although there is some weaker characterization in the early game, and it’s just fun to figure out how to use your curses on others while doing your best to avoid theirs. It’s a great game for lovers of the genre and mystery stories in general.
