I never played the first Paranormasight game, but friends and colleagues always told me it would be right up my alley. I love visual novels and adventure games like these, but for some reason I never found the time to pick it up. Now, having played through the sequel, Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse, ahead of its release, I realise I have been a fool to ignore the now-series. 

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse has you stepping into the shoes of Yuza Minakuchi, an 18-year-old boy who, five years ago, was the lone survivor of a terrible tragedy at sea that saw his parents and many others from his village perish. His memories of the events are foggy at best, but after briefly attending high school on the mainland, Yuza returns to his island home of Kameshima, where the bulk of the game’s story takes place. 

Kameshima is a fascinating place. It’s ostensibly a fictional island, but it’s steeped in the mythology, culture, and tradition of very real places. The game makes no effort in hiding this — it tells you exactly where you are in Japan, but leaves the exact minute details to you. 

It’s a small, rural, island town with a population of a couple hundred people at best, which means just about everybody knows everybody else, and keeping secrets secret for long is pretty much off the table. It’s also home to a small and dwindling community of ama divers, which are free divers that make a living collecting crustaceans and sometimes treasure or lost goods from the sea floor. It’s a dangerous job, but good divers can make a fairly comfortable living — at least, they could back in the 80s, when this game takes place. 

Yuza’s mother and grandmother were both ama divers, and after finding little enjoyment living on the mainland, he decides to take up the mantle and try his hand at diving himself. Part of that desire is to keep his mother’s spirit alive within him, but he’s also looking for something, or someone: a mermaid. Mermaids have long been a part of Kameshima’s mythology, and Yuza thinks that his mum may have been connected to them in some way, and that maybe one saved him during that tragedy five years ago. 

Instead, what he finds is a Tomokazuki, a strange, cursed creature that usually tricks divers into being plunged into the depths, never to return. This encounter, however, sees the Tomokazuki helping Yuza, though I can’t say exactly how — that would spoil one of the many mysteries of Paranormasight. Still, seeing a mythical creature only strengthens his resolve, and he teams up with his childhood friends Azami and Tsukasa, as well as the latter’s strangely distant friend, Sato, to uncover the mysteries of the land. 

Yuza isn’t the only one looking for mermaids. Fantasy writer Avi Barnum is visiting the area for a chance to meet one himself, accompanied by paranormal exorcist Circe Lunarlight. Investigator from the Paranormal Affairs Bureau Yumeko Shiki, as well as her psychic assistant Sodo Kiryu, are also in the area, investigating rumblings of a curse in the seas as well as two separate but seemingly related murder cases. There’s a lot of moving pieces and a pretty big cast, but it’s fairly easy to keep track of everything. 

Throughout the game you’ll swap back and forth between many of these characters, each with their own timeline of events. It’s a story that’s told largely non-linearly, and that might be the game’s most intriguing feature. There’s a big, twisted story of intertwined perspectives and story threads that all feed into each other, overlap, diverge, and rejoin at key moments, and it’s handled absolutely perfectly. No matter which order you choose to complete story chapters in, and with which characters, it’s built in such a way that it always slowly reveals information for you to piece together. 

I absolutely adore this style of storytelling. Non-linear storytelling is really tricky to pull off, especially in games, because you risk the player losing interest or getting frustrated by not having enough information. Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse cleverly sidesteps this by knowledge-gating certain aspects of the story until you have enough information to get through them — but completing other chapters can still add crucial information and additional context to your knowledge pool, which helps not only with figuring things out faster and more easily, but with triggering alternate outcomes. 

The end result is a story that feels more engaging than most video game stories, often because you’re left with multiple options to pursue. I spent a good few hours following Avi’s storyline instead of others’ because it was incredibly gripping, and doing so gave me additional context for part of Yumeko’s storyline that had technically been available the entire time. If I’d followed Yumeko’s storyline sooner, it would have been a little more difficult to piece it all together, but it would have given me an easier time in Sato’s storyline. It all feels neatly put together in a way that makes each player’s playthrough both entirely unique and similar in required brain power. 

It’s not just structurally satisfying, too — the story itself is a straight banger. It’s filled with obscure Japanese mythology, incredible twists and turns, and very well-written characters that I desperately want to spend more time with. The first night I had the game I accidentally stayed up til 4am playing it, without realising how much time had passed, simply because of how engrossed I was in the story. It’s really damn good, and I bet it gets even better if you’ve played the first game (I haven’t, but I certainly will now). 

The gameplay itself is a fairly straightforward visual novel affair, mixed with point-and-click adventure elements akin to something like Ace Attorney or Famicom Detective Club. Most of the gameplay consists of looking around the environment, clicking on things and people, and selecting dialogue options from a menu. There are a few additional mechanics – most of which I won’t mention for fear of spoiling anything – as well as a diving minigame that is simple but surprisingly engaging. 

What makes Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse an absolute delight to play is how these simple and straightforward game mechanics are woven into the story. Every UI element, mechanic, and minigame is used to its fullest, with the game all too willing to prey on you taking it for granted to deliver some phenomenal moments. It’s something Emio did similarly to great effect, but this is on a whole other level. Every little seemingly insignificant thing in this game is important in one way or another.

You’ll notice I’ve been tiptoeing around spoilers a lot in this review, and there’s a good reason for that: the less you know about this game the better. Going in as blind as possible is paramount to the experience, because it’s a game all about figuring things out for yourself — or if not by yourself, at least with a friend or a family member. There will undoubtedly be strategy guides released the moment this game hits its release date, but I’d implore you not to go looking for them. 

Despite my praise, there are a few minor points of contention that stop Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s curse from being a perfect game, though it certainly gets close. A few mechanics were overly fiddly, to the point where even when I had figured out what to do, I had trouble triggering it. In one such case, I had to reload the chapter to get it to work — I’m not sure if it was a bug solved by reloading or if I simply got better at adapting to the slight jank, but it was frustrating to think I was doing the wrong thing only to find out I was doing the right thing all along and the game wasn’t recognising it. 

I also think it could have done with some amount of voice acting. I’m mostly fine with it not having any, but there were a few key moments that I feel could have been greatly elevated with a good performance behind it. 

Other than that, I have basically no complaints. It looks wonderful on Switch 2, with an absolutely gorgeous hand-drawn art style that conveys a lot of emotion with little animation, it has a wonderful and moody soundtrack, and it runs great, too. It would’ve been nice to have mouse controls, too, but this is a Switch game running on Switch 2, not a native Switch 2 game, so I understand the omission. Still, maybe a future Switch 2 Edition could make this already incredible game even better. 

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse is nothing short of phenomenal. It’s a master class in storytelling, using the most of the visual novel genre to make for a truly unique game that kept me engaged and enthralled from start to finish. You owe it to yourself to play it. 

Rating: 4.5/5