Upon the first knowing press of the “Use Curse” button encroached in the top left of the screen, Paranormasight presents an idea oh-so-tantalizing. A game of death and survival: one where the protagonist is prepared, nay, eager to get his hands bloodied. It’s such an interesting proposition! Unfortunately, that proposition just isn’t what the game is.

Once the first protagonist’s story concludes and the story chart is unlocked, the “Use Curse” button, no matter how many times it taunts you, is never actually activated again as far as I can remember. As it turns out, Paranormasight is actually more of a police procedure heavily drenched in mythos. Despite some misgivings about the bait-and-switch, y’know what, I’m perfectly fine with what Paranormasight decided to be. It’s a good police procedural!

Every mystery being peeled away at, both with the modern series of deaths and the titular Seven Nine Mysteries of Honjo, is really intriguing and plays with the cultural of the surrounding area. There’s a five minute conversation about how a river’s pollution affects the surrounding area both physically and spiritually. That’s just an objectively cool thing to have in a videogame! Backing it is a fairly surface-level but charming cast that plays off each other well.

It feels silly to say “the biggest problem with the majority of the game is that there’s TOO MUCH interesting stuff”, but… yeah, kinda. Between a dozen different mysteries going on between past and present, a bunch of maguffins constantly changing hands, and a cast of like 25 characters that remain constantly important throughout the entire game, it’s a lot! It’s got a cast as big as its similarly-structured contemporary 13 Sentinels in less than a third of the runtime, which is just to much for me to all fit into my head in so little time. I was constantly checking through the (extremely comprehensive and well done) in-game encyclopedia to refresh myself on who or what was even being talked about in a scene. But ultimately, did I mind it that much? Not reallyyyyy. Even if I think the whole dead cop storyline could be excised without losing much, the game remained consistently interesting that I was more than willing to meet it on it’s level.

Greatly helping the investment in each scene is the absolutely killer presentation. Despite the obviously limited budget for art assets (though what’s there is INCREDIBLE), the game does some genuinely impressive character blocking to wrings a lot of dynamism out of its spriteset. I do wish the game had voice acting as the cherry on top, but budget constraints do be that way. A lot of cool gameplay concepts intermingle with the presentation as well, like going into the settings to silence a spirit’s deadly commands or touching fingers to communicate with a spirit. All these cool little details really add up to an experience you can feel the developers’ pouring out of.

Yet, despite all my adoration for most elements of the game, thinking about the game now makes me feel kinda empty. It’s all that god damned ending’s fault. The in-universe Paranormasight sets up to the conclusion of it’s story and it’s characters, gets like 90% of the way there, and then misses the spike as it focuses on the conclusion to mysterious meta-plot Paranormasight. While I’m all for meta-y conclusions (just look at the top games on my profile lol), the fact it just doesn’t tie in at all to the story of the characters I spent the entire game with just sucked all of the oxygen out of the room.

Maybe the lack of satisfaction is part of the point, playing into the game’s ultimate moral. Maybe—I realize as I’m typing this—that’s the point of the prologue’s bait and switch as well. To engage at all is to fail. Maybe I’ve finally rubbed up against the game where I’m the stupid gamer who wants true art to be degraded to appeal to uncomplicated satisfactions. Or maybe this ending is just stupid? Who can really say.

The game’s still good overall, definitely worth a play for its presentation and intruige alone. I just wish it hit the final landing for me. Well, I also wish for a sequel, but based on Squeenix’s recent direction ahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa