Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo was one of the most delightful surprises for the Switch; a visual novel that broke the fourth wall in unique ways while telling a compelling story laced with horror. The sequel, Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse, is more of the same, and that’s a good thing. If Square Enix wants to keep putting out new Paranormasight cases for the foreseeable future, that’s A-okay with me.
Unlike the first title, The Mermaid’s Curse spends a little more time setting up the story and providing more background behind the mysteries at play. As such, you might find the first couple of hours quite slow by comparison, though the result is a narrative that eventually feels more fleshed out and complete. That said, there’s no denying that you’ll need to persevere through the opening segments to get to the good stuff, and that’s something that simply wasn’t a thing with the original.
Progression is mostly a case of chatting with your companions while observing your surroundings and completing the odd minigame. One of the earlier scenes has you diving to the sea bed in an effort to recover valuable material, and the more you succeed, the more you can increase your ability to swim, extract items, breathe, etc. It’s shallow stuff (pun totally intended), but it’s a nice little detour from the lengthy dialogue sequences.
Otherwise, yes, The Mermaid’s Curse is loaded with text that you’ll need to work your way through fairly slowly if you want to take it all in over the roughly 10-hour runtime. Specifically, the in-game files and character profiles contain hundreds of words’ worth of backstory and lore. This isn’t a game to rush through.
In fact, it can be a little frustrating at times, since you’re essentially unable to progress onto the next scene until you’ve exhausted all possible lines of dialogue. This means pursuing the same topics multiple times until every character has had their say. The game does indicate which ones you’ve completed with a handy little tick next to each subject, but it can definitely feel quite drawn out.
If you’re also a fan of the oppressive, grim nature of the original game, The Mermaid’s Curse might also give you a bit of whiplash. Lots of scenes take place in broad daylight, with seemingly no sign of anything weird or supernatural. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of the story involves exploring past events, historical context, and interrogating various characters. You’re certainly not going to be using curses every five minutes to kill an NPC, and overall, it never feels particularly unsettling or scary.
It’s still well worth your time, though, even if it doesn’t match up to the original. As for performance, everything runs perfectly fine on the Switch, with some lovely DS-inspired static images throughout along with excellent, mysterious music. Similarly, I experienced no hitches on the Switch 2, so if that’s your platform of choice, you’ll be fine there.
