Some of my favorite games of all time are visual novel hybrids, such as the Somnium Files, Zero Escape, and Danganronpa games. My absolute favorite feature in games is fourth-wall breaking, especially in horror games – when the horror breaks out of the game into real life, that’s when I really start to feel the rush (such as in Pony Island, Inscryption, Until Dawn, Doki Doki Literature Club, and The Stanley Parable). In the first hour of Xseed’s new horror visual novel Paranormasight, I was excited that this might be the game to combine two of my great loves in an interesting new way. Unfortunately, while the story is intriguing and presents some cool timeline hopping that can only exist in a video game, the few amazing moments when it capitalizes on breaking the fourth wall are diluted by unbelievable swaths of repeated and rehashed text.

One other minor annoyance is that this game maxes out at 1080p on PC. My 1440p monitor had to upscale it to match the size, making the picture blurry. While it didn’t really take away from my enjoyment, I’m startled because since I started PC gaming in 2015 this is the very first game I’ve come across that does not have a 1440p resolution setting. It’s a simple thing but it feels oddly lazy when a huge amount of PC gamers are using 2560×1440 resolutions, if not higher. Then again, this is published by Square Enix, and I’ve learned to expect low quality from their PC ports as of late. I also had a bug a few times where the game continued to register the movement of the cursor but wouldn’t let me click on any buttons, but closing and restarting the game fixed that.

I enjoyed a lot of Paranormasight, and I think I’d have a much higher opinion of the game if it didn’t insist on rehashing the same plot to me over and over to pad out the play time. The music is great, the art is nice, and I the script is really well written. With such an interesting premise this could have been a big hit for me, but, alas – it wasn’t meant to be. I do still recommend Paranormasight for any visual novel fans out there, although the execution is going to allay the concerns the wider gaming audience has with the genre.

Abandoned after 2.5 hours.

BAD
- the main character is the biggest asshole on the planet and only gets worse as he goes. He's an asshole to the companion AI 100% of the time even tho the AI is offering actual help, the MC keeps telling it to eat a bag of dicks. He's a misogynistic dude bro to the extreme and i fucking hate him.
- they give you like 4 bullets for your one gun for the first mission and the lowest grunts take 3 headshots to kill so you have to use melee exclusively and it fucking sucks
- there's a lot of sexual assault jokes already, not to mention all of the "satire" in the game is basically just them saying "comrade" over and over while the MC talks about how big his muscles are and how he only plays by his own rules even though he literally is a black ops guy for the russian military
- every fucking room you go in you have to scan 20+ boxes by hovering over them and holding down F and it's miserable in addition to making the game move at a snail's pace between that and stealth sections. This is not a high octane fast paced shooter in any way and it should not have been advertised as such
- i kept dying due to bugs and lost tons of progress because it only saves at checkpoints, and hitboxes are fucked on the enemies
- features the world's worst lockpicking mini game
- the mc literally never shuts up, i want to die, please free me

GOOD
- it's fucking gorgeous. it is one of the best meetings of high fidelity graphics, amazing performance, next gen lighting, and thoughtful curated art design ever
- robo titties