This is a hard one to publicly review because not only is it a narrative game and therefore "best to go in blind" like most of them, I think having your expectations set up even by vague descriptions of the game's strengths and weaknesses could also affect the experience.

But, basically, I do think this game is a worthwhile play for people who like mystery visual novel type games. Don't let the game's marketing mislead you, this is not a horror game, it's a mystery with some horror aesthetic but it's not scary. Its strongest point is its presentation, graphics, character designs, and the coherence of the web of mysteries it weaves.

The part that I think is harder to say is: (Still not actually a spoiler:) This game starts off really strong and presents some amazing hooks, but it fails to follow up on any of them in a truly satisfying manner. The prologue set my expectations very high and the rest of the game, despite staying entirely competent and never being bad, just never met that level of quality again, which ends up being a disappointment. The reason I don't want to say this to a potential buyer is that the most fun I had with the game was the first chapter, my mind was abuzz with excitement over all the possibilities the game was setting up - I was ready to strongly recommend it to my friends - "Hey I started Paranormasight and wow it's actually really good!" and if I knew from a review that it was ultimately going to underwhelm, I wouldn't have had that level of enjoyment which I did! If I knew that the 9/10 intro was going to give way to a 6/10 rest of the game, I wouldn't have enjoyed the 9/10 part as much as I did. It’s very rare for me for a game to start strong and then just become almost a different game, so I’ve never really had to think about managing people’s expectations in this way before. But seriously, the rest of the game is not bad at all, it's just sadly underwhelming.

FULL SPOILER ANALYSIS FROM HERE ON OUT:

So... where do I think this game went wrong? Well, there's a lot of ways, so I'll just go in a random order off the top of my head:

• The flowchart structure with multiple characters is not used well. Compare to 428: Shibuya Scramble for example, which uses the concept amazingly - In that game, the characters are all on journeys which are mostly separate, dealing with totally different parts of the game's story, and the ways they come together or interact all feel really special when it happens. In this game, there is very little purpose to having three separate "protagonists" - It takes not very long at all before your different groups meet up and start working together. Mio is already an ally to the police and halfway through the game they just share all their info and then go off to work on separate parts of the same investigation briefly before regrouping to share what they learned, or even just tag along with each other for multiple segments! Harue and Richter also join the cops for a while and exchange info. There's not really any feeling that you're playing three seperate storylines which will ultimately converge, nevermind the idea that the different protagonists might have different goals from one another or any conflicts, they're just on the same side and working together! Hell, multiple segments of Yakko and Harue's routes are just spent watching Ttutsumi and Erio solve things.

• This leads us into the next, related issue - Half of the "protagonists" are not really protagonists at all! Like I just said above, it's basically like Tsutsumi and Erio are the real protagonists, everything ultimately revolves around them and their investigation, Mio (and Yakko) just help with it a bit and Richter is just investigating the same thing as them but off on the side. It all converges on them. But also, as you can tell from how I've described things here - Yakko and Harue are barely even the "protagonist" of their own routes! Mio and Richter are the ones who actually do... everything. A lot of the time it's more like Yakko and Harue are just your PoV character as you watch the actual detective do all the work. Like having a PoV of Watson in a Sherlock Holmes story. Once Yakko finishes resolving the stuff with her dead friend, she has nothing to contribute and she's just the eyes we see Mio and the others through. Harue basically never does anything at all, the only thing added is that she provides a distinct PoV from the others, but she is still only ever passively reacting to Richter.

• Harue... what a disappointment. I can honestly say that the peak of Harue being an interesting character was her very first scene. She was mysterious, she had depth, there was a sense of danger around her, we're wondering if she's truly a bad person or not, it was very compelling. But then once we take control of her, she is entirely neutered. The game sort of tries this thing where it wants her to be the "morally grey" character who might actually want to kill, except they only go halfway with it because Richter immediately tells her not to kill and she basically goes "okay fine i guess". Then they keep trying to toe the line by suggesting maybe she still wants to do it, but she never does. Almost like the game was scared to have a protagonist who is actually morally grey, like, they're worried players wouldn't like it if one of the characters was actually a murderer so they just have her constantly think "i'll totally do it! i will, seriously!" but she never actually does. Also, to be honest, I get the impression that this game was probably written by a bunch of men who have no idea what it's actually like to be a mother who lost their child, her character's concept is great but it feels like the examination of her mindset never goes beyond surface-level. She's just not a very dynamic character. It's very sad because she could've been my favourite based on her initial concept. As a sidenote, it's also confusing why Richter is apparently a very moral person who wants to help others but he's kinda-sorta okay with excusing crimes? I didn't understand this and it again seemed more like a plot convenience to add some sense of "Danger" to Harue's route even if it compromises his character arc since he otherwise is meant to care a lot about justice. (He literally quit the police because he thought they couldn't help people enough)

• Speaking of Harue never actually using her curse… Well, that’s the other issue - no one does! The prologue is the only part of the game where you use the curses at all. By the nighttime chapter, most of the characters have resolved to not use it, and then in daytime it can’t be used at all. I was waiting for the game’s climax to happen when night fell again and there was another night chapter but no, it just… ends in the early evening. It’s very dissapointing that the prologue sets up your expectations for, y’know, a killing game, and then that angle is entirely dropped because every character is a do-gooder. It’d be like a Danganronpa game where no one commits any murders after the first chapter because they’re all good people. Like, yeah, it makes sense that the characters wouldn’t want to use killing curses, but it makes for a boring story! The curses are almost irrelevant – Like, Mayu gets the counter-attack curse but this is entirely random, she never uses it, it doesn’t relate to her at all, even though it’s the most important one because it belongs to the originator of the curses! But it just goes to this random character who gives it up immediately. Look, I’m not saying a story needs to have a bunch of killing action to be interesting! But I like those kinds of stories and when you set me up for one and then just don’t do it, you really mess with my expectations. The parts of the game where you're in conversation with someone trying to get them to activate your curse while figure out what theirs is is one of the best concepts, and it's just never used past the prologue except for one other time.

• Villains. The game basically has two climactic villains, Ayame, and… Yoko? Kind of? Ayame is… one of the least compelling characters in the game, maybe just the least compelling. Her character sort of makes no sense, the weird art motive is… weird, it just never really landed for me as something to take seriously. And beyond that, she’s just… completely unrelatable? Like, there’s a good basis for a character there, resenting her father for being distant and stuff, except she’s just a totally unlikeable person, her bio basically describes her as a sociopath from the start, and instead of keeping her grounded in some realistic place they actually have her wanting to kill her father just because he as a bad father! And then the actual “main villain* is a character who we spent about 5 seconds with after it’s revealed she’s the villain, and 4 of those seconds are still her putting on an act. She has no relatable motive at all, just that she found out her ancestor was an evil psycho so she decided she wanted to be one too. Why is there not any scene at all of her talking to us in villain mode? Not to mention, why is the game’s ending so anticlimactic?! Mio and Erio solve a riddle, then they die, then we just go back to the start and say none of this ever happened, yay. There’s barely even a climax. The climax is with Ayame, not the actual main villain. Also, just on a personal level, I really don’t like villain twists where a previously nice character was actually just a psycho the whole time. If you are going to take a previously friendly character and make them evil, don’t make it just a total fake persona they had, integrate it! Explain to me how their nice side got corrupted, or that they’re still a reasonable person who can be nice sometimes but also has a dark side, or something, don’t just say “yeah they’re an evil psycho, all the time you spent with them when they were nice was just fake”, it’s just not satisfying.

And uh, I mean I think that’s basically it for the main points? Beyond that, I just think the game sadly didn’t live up to its potential for having emotional climaxes. I’d say the séance scene when Yakko says goodbye to her friend is the emotional peak of the game and was a very nice scene, I do think Harue got a decent ending but it’s weird that it happened only because of Ayame, and Ttsutsumi’s was sadly hard to care about because of Ayame being such a weak character. So, yeah, it’s too bad, I think they could’ve done better. As it stands, I like all the characters but most of them just sadly don’t get any deep moments that would elevate them to being characters I truly care about or will stick with me in my memories for a long time. But, like I said all the way back at the start, the game does resolve all its mysteries in satisfying ways without any plot holes or dropped points, so it was still all fine.

I absolutely loved my time with Paranormasight. It deserves the effort of a well structured review, but I'm not feeling motivated at the moment, so I'm just going to write.

Paranormasight is more of a supernatural mystery visual novel than horror as it bills itself. There are certainly horror elements, but the mystery is the focus and it's done extremely well. There was never a moment that I felt like something just came out of left field -- there were surprises, but they always made sense in the end. It was an excellently thought-out and written storyline.

I think the characters may have been the highlight here, even with the overall narrative and mystery being so well done. The diversity was nice -- from your standard anime high schoolers, to mid-20s, a mid 30s mother, a detective in his 50s, and so on. I found that they all behaved believably... well, unless there was a supernatural reason for them not to. The backstories and motivations were solid for each, and humor was used fairly liberally and effectively in character building moments.

The art and music were great. The creepy atmospheric tracks were spot on, the more dramatic choir themes were excellent, and I very much enjoyed the somewhat goofy jazz theme that would accompany a pair of detectives in the less dire moments. The character designs and expressions were top notch, and I enjoyed the scenery as I searched each of the games locations for the (optional) collectible Mocking Bird stickers -- which included such greats as a penguin with a pompadour and an eagle with a mohawk and biker jacket.

In the 13 hours it took me to reach the true ending, there was only one point that I found a puzzle to be annoying. It required advancing a completely unrelated and fairly easy to miss conversation in a different scene altogether. I generally made sure to exhaust all conversation options, so it was mainly bad luck that I missed this one and couldn't figure out how to proceed for a bit. Still, there was no indication of what I needed to do other than a brute force search. That said, all of the other puzzles were well done and required a bit of clever thinking. There are some meta elements to some of the puzzles that I found well done and enjoyable to figure out.

There's a couple of other quick things to mention. While the game features multiple endings, it is essentially a linear affair -- there's no real branching to be had here. Perfectly fine with me, but I know that's not everyone's cup of tea. Also, as mentioned above the horror elements are fairly light. If you want to be frightened, this isn't the game. Again, that's actually to my preference -- I love games that have a horror flavor without actually messing up my sleep haha.

Anyway, this is another case where I wish Grouvee had a 10 point or more rating system. Despite doing everything extremely well, I don't think Paramorasight will have quite the same lasting impact that most of the narrative games I gave a 5/5 had, but I just liked it too much to stick it at 4/5.

I've had my eyes on this for a while and I finally decided to check what's all the praise about. Turns out that Paranormasight is the type of game that comes close to being good... but no cigar.

Paranormasight is a creepy visual novel. A very well written one, in fact. Those are the game's biggest strenghts, from top to bottom. The setting looks spooky, characters are weird and mystery prowls around the whole story. The presentation is quite nice, which helps you to put up with some rather long expositions and slow moments, at times.

Because, truth be told, Paranormasight is a massive slow burn. Don't get me wrong, the story is very well put together and I actually cared for some of its characters (mostly Tsutsumi, Harue and Richter), but it took a long while to get there. There are some shocking twists here and there and some TENSE conversations, with reveals that I was actually not expecting. But in order to get to those moments, you have to go through lots of redundant dialogues.

Two things that I loved about this game, that kept me constantly piecing the story together, were how meticulous the files were organized for you to keep up to date with what was happening, and the "Story Chart". It's a nice structure, leading you through different timelines, optional scenes and more.

But while Paranormalsight got me hooked at first, it just kept dropping the ball. It mostly feels fine... just never great. I liked the characters - but they don't stand out, the story is good - but not immersive, well written - but insipid. Took me longer than it should to finish it because it never kept a good momentum going.

I was also disappointed by the use of curses in this game. I know it's a VN, but I expected a bit more interactivity from this. At first, it feels like it's going to be a big deal whether you use them or not, but you can barely use them, and when you do, it hardly lets you go with it. Decisions matter very little as well. Not to mention the soundtrack, which is bland as hell. At least the endings were cool. All of them but the "true one", to be honest.

I do not recommend Paranormasight. There are better visual novels out there and way better creepy stories to experience.

It's a game that has the elements to reach acclaim, but it's never quite there.