6. Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, dev. Square Enix
You start Paranormasight playing as Shogo Okiie, a typical protagonist for one of these Japanese-style point and click adventure games. He's the assumed universal perspective (with all the cultural-political baggage that comes with): a young man, just horny enough without being gross about it, with no particular personality, skillset, or knowledge. Somebody innocent and ignorant enough they need exposition but generic enough to be inoffensive. Shogo also turns out to be probably the most evil perspective you inhabit. Right after acquiring your powers, you as Shogo go on a brutal killing spree across the Sumida ward of Tokyo. That is, until Shogo himself is found very, very dead. This genre of game gives you multiple paths and choices in a branching story tree. You can take Shogo's story in several different directions. Only problem is that none of them end well. It is all dead ends for Shogo.
And that's where Paranormasight actually begins. With the classic protagonist tropes fully abandoned. Indeed, none of the other characters you find even interact with Shogo in their campaigns. He has been seemingly erased from history, while the other characters keep bouncing into each other. There's also a creepy masked man standing outside the story entirely directing "you" to watch the events unfold on a television set. That "you" would be me, the player, the audience, now completely disembodied from any avatar. I was pretty hooked from this point onwards.
"Honjo" is the old name for a neighborhood of Tokyo since reorganized into the modern Sumida Ward. (I've actually been here, weirdly enough, just last September, did not even realize I would be exploring it soon in a video game.) Paranormasight is playing up the history of this area, back before it was absorbed into the growing Tokyo Metropolis and was just an Edo-era town. There has been a long-running rumor that this area was haunted, thus the claim of "Seven Mysteries" or "Seven Wonders". Paranormasight notes there are actually nine, not seven. These are all little ghost stories or urban legends, such as the sound of wooden clappers that follow you home on dark and stormy nights. If you played Kingdom Hearts II and remember the "Seven Wonders of Twilight Town", that was playing into this Japanese horror trope. In Paranormasight, each of these ghost stories gives a specially chosen bearer a secret deadly power, and a wish. Kill enough people and your wish may be granted.
Shogo had the lucky power of getting to kill anybody who turned their back to him. A different protagonist, Harue, a depressed mother searching for the truth of who murdered her son, gets the power to burn anybody to death if they have a lighter on them. Yutaro, one of the many possible suspects you run into, has the power to kill anybody who hears a ghostly song he summons. (The way you get around that little puzzle is one of many places where Paranormasight gets extremely meta and clever.) So you have nine chosen magical people running around Sumida/Honjo trying to hunt each other down, it's a great set-up. Some are trying to solve all the mysteries and same the day, some have no wish other than killing for killing's own sake.
The mildly disappointing thing with Paranormasight is how rarely you end up getting to use your powers after Shogo's opening arc. All the protagonists you play as are very cautious with their powers. There are only a few "Bad Endings". There are even multiple times where game seems to let you use your Killing Spell, and then it does not trigger. That's just a tease. However, we do get a lot of twists and reveals. There's a surprise Escape Room sequence too, where again, you have lost all sense of identity. This is a game that knows you have out of context/out of character knowledge you're bringing to each branch of the story and really wants to play with that idea.
The biggest mystery of all is not who is causing this Death Game in Honjo, it is this: just what the Hell are you? What is this audience apparatus interfering with the events of the story? How is that coherent with characters and character choice? It is always fun when a game wants to explore those ideas. Paranormasight is doing cool things.
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