Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse Review – A Mix of Improvements and Flaws

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse Review

Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo was a bizarre horror/ mystery visual novel with 90s point-and-click adventure game elements. The game was developed by Square Enix. It had a gripping narrative and pleasing visual aesthetic, but the Switch version was an awful port. Three years later, and with little notice, Square Enix has dropped a sequel for Switch and PC. Read on to find out if Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse improves upon its predecessor’s flaws.

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse begins with the same weird narrator as the first game. The narrator addresses the player directly and tells them they will be experiencing the game’s story through the POV of Yuza Minakuchi. Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse’s plot is best left unexplained. The basic setup is about Yuza, an aspiring diver in a small 1980s island village, who believes he saw a mermaid that might be his long-lost Mom. It’s a fantastic story that draws heavily upon Japanese folklore about water creatures and spirits.

“Choose Your Own Adventure”

Although most of Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse is reading through the story, there is some “Choose Your Own Adventure”-like progression. The player will need to replay sections to find the best way forward. After beginning the game, Yuzo goes for his first dive. Afterwards, he meets a few people in his village who warn of a coming storm and a past calamity. The player then sees a vision of members of the village lying dead. The narrator then pops back up and gives the player some hints about what they might’ve missed. During a diving minigame, there’s a hole Yuza can investigate, where he sees a ghostly version of himself floating up towards him. After witnessing this, it unlocks additional dialogue options afterwards.

When going through dialogue, there’s sometimes text highlighted in blue. This text has additional files that can be read from a menu by pressing X. There are also sections where the player finds important dialogue that unlocks new chapter paths. After a chapter is completed, the player is brought to a menu to choose a new chapter. New chapters are gained from completing a prior chapter or finding important dialogue in extended sections. Sometimes chapters are completed, but won’t have every option explored. The game keeps chapters dark until every path is discovered.

Point-and-Click Gameplay

There are also point-and-click elements in Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse’s gameplay. There are lots of sections where the player has to scan the screen and click on everything with their cursor to gather information. These sections are where conversations are started between characters. I didn’t find these sections nearly as pixel hunt-like and annoying as I did in the first game.

Sometimes the player has to select someone to talk to, and then the dialogue options come on screen. But for some reason, the game won’t put the cursor over a dialogue option, so the game kicks the player out of that menu, and the player has to carefully go through everything to make sure they select the right option. There are lots of annoying navigational issues like this in Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse. A little more modern quality assurance should have easily gotten rid of these. Unfortunately, Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse is only a Switch game, so it doesn’t have Switch 2 mouse support. This would have really helped justify the use of a cursor.

Diving Minigame

The gameplay is very simple for the diving minigame where Yuza searches for critters to gather underwater. The controls just require the player to aim with the left joystick in first person, swim forwards with A, and repeatedly click on collectables with A when targeted. Every creature is worth experience points, and Yuza gains more EXP every time he breaks a size record or breaks an overall points record for a dive. The experience points can be put towards stats for staying underwater longer, swimming faster, gathering faster, or seeing further away treasures.

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse has one of these diving segments very early on, and I died three times before successfully completing it. There was an incredibly small amount of time between the game telling the player they should surface, and the time it takes to get to the surface. A little more warning from the game would have made this potentially chill minigame a lot less frustrating. I did get the hang of diving quickly though, and enjoyed the cozy grind to occasionally break up story sections. Like other aspects of Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse, a little more quality assurance could have curbed this early annoyance.

Menu Frustration

The menus also have lots of annoying glitch moments. When I tried to adjust the game’s brightness, the screen kept jiggling up and down. There was also an annoying effect over all the text, which the game called “chromatic aberration”. It gave the words a red shadow that made them a little difficult to read. Thankfully, I was able to turn this off and have cleaner text. A welcome improvement is that the cursor control in Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse is much better than the first game. I was able to easily use the pointer in menus by moving the joystick, and it wasn’t overly sensitive at all. In an ideal world, the game would ditch the menu cursor altogether and just have normal controller navigation, though.

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse’s graphics are 2D character portraits over backgrounds that are a mix of 3D and realistic 2D environments. Even though there’s very little animation, the cutscene direction is excellent. The camera is constantly changing the framing of its shots, making the story presentation feel like it has animated cutscenes, and not just static images. Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse isn’t one of those visual novels that’s only character portraits and backgrounds. The music is also phenomenal. The overall tone has great mix of whimsical seaside vibes, and lurking dread. The tonal shift works wonderfully.

A Vast Improvement

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse is a technical improvement over Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo. It still has some problems that should have been flagged during quality assurance testing. The cursor should just be dropped from all sections that aren’t point-and-click. But the narrative is fantastic, and the “Choose Your Own Adventure” chapter structure makes the experience feel more like a game, and less like a novel. The stylistic visuals mask Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse’s low budget, and the music is constantly phenomenal. I’m not sure if the first game has been patched, but Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse is enough of an improvement that I might give it another try.

***Switch code provided by the publisher***