First of all, the presentation is wonderful, some of the best I have ever seen in a VN. (Although I don’t understand the apparently industry-wide allergy to using curly quotes and apostrophes.) On the basis of vibes, this is a five-star game. The soundtrack in particular is lovely.

Unfortunately a VN is not just an audiovisual experience, but first and foremost a story, and as a story, Paranormasight is...a lot. On one hand, I appreciate that, as visual novels go, this one is mercifully short, only 10-15 hours. On the other hand, there are so many heavy themes in this game that wind up underserved by the story, I...I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I...I think I wish it were longer?!

Well, some room to breathe might have helped, but the issues with the writing run quite a bit deeper, one of the main ones being that Ishiyama Takanari (credited both as director and sole writer) is unable to portray extreme emotions or psychological states. The characters work fine as archetypes—you got your gruff daddy cop, spunky schoolgirl, eccentric private eye, wealthy housewife, etc.—but their lack of human depth becomes obvious as soon as the emotional stakes are raised. As a result the darker and more lurid aspects of the story come off as cheap and often icky exploitation.

Paranormasight is not shy about including some of the most horrific shit that can happen to a human being: the lore contains a graphic parallel to the real-life torture and murder of Furuta Junka (in fact multiple children in the game are kidnapped, tortured, and murdered); and a girl violently coerced into participating in the murder of a child is later raped by a teacher threatening to expose her, and then summarily run over by a car. Bleak stuff! But rather than showing any genuine interest in how these horrors might affect somebody—like a grieving mother, or a teenager wracked with guilt after learning that her friend was suffering unimaginable abuse—the game seems more invested in unserious twists and gotcha moments. Like, hey, you know that girl you thought died by suicide because she was suffering unimaginable abuse? Turns out she was actually run over by a car!

(Half the plot hinging on a random hit-and-run is maybe the worst bit of writing in the game, but it is rivaled by the final mind-boggling twist of...aha, turns out you already killed the villain, because part of you knew she was the villain, but then a different part of you unkilled her, so you could learn that killing is bad before you kill her again, or something? Lmao. Nothing in the prologue makes any sense whatsoever retroactively—like how is Shogo, the blandest man in the world, or the spirit within him, or whatever, supposed to be this scion of good in the battle between good and evil when he/you immediately embark[s] on an unrepentant murder spree?)

The more low-key story beats, like Tetsuo’s absent-father angst, or the sinister corporate machinations of Hihaku Soaps, end up tragically overshadowed by Ishiyama’s insistence on explaining his dumb paranormal rules down to the smallest punctilio. Like, dude. I could not possibly give less of a shit about soul dregs! It is hard to care about the particularities of who is able to kill whom under what circumstances when these details so rarely matter. If the story played out as more of a pulpy death game, with the characters trying to outwit each other to survive, these details might feel more relevant (and the tone might feel more appropriate). But Paranormasight never quite finds its genre groove: it’s too predictable as a mystery, inconsistent as a thriller, and never fully commits to horror. In the end, it probably works best as the anime equivalent of a trashy ’80s buddy cop movie, or as a Monkey’s Paw-style morality play—although its ideas about morality are also pretty wonky. At one point it is suggested, with a straight face, that a kidnapping victim who kills her captor to escape might just as bad, deep down, as the guy who kidnaps her—a man who has tortured and murdered several people for kicks. Uh, what.

I almost kind of admire just how much this game bites off and tries to swallow without chewing. There’s a red herring suggesting police corruption will play a major role in the plot, while in the end it’s implied that people only hate the police because they are workaholics who don’t spend enough time with their kids (or because they’re just too darn good at catching the bad guys). There’s a subplot about juvenile gangs that raises the specter of all manner of social issues that are never addressed. There’s an unresolved tension with the story’s own attitude toward the supernatural; on one hand, it is very much real (and explained to death), but on the other, legends about the supernatural are falsely embellished memories of ordinary phenomena. There’s some meta stuff tossed into the blender, too, because why not. There’s the Storyteller’s gender being listed as “???” for some reason when he is only described using male pronouns (when gender-neutral pronouns are correctly used elsewhere in the script), an inconsistency I thought might be setting up for a twist, but no, it’s just weird. (I demand nonbinary Storyteller to be canon!!) There’s even more weird gender stuff when you consider that the original sin in this universe, unleashing unspeakable evil across generations, was a bad lady wanting to be pretty.

I would like to be charitable to this game because it is not without charm (and the music really does bang), but the story just feels so cynical and pointless. Paranormasight is a perfect illustration of what happens when a story is assembled from a list of popular tropes (or a “1980s Japan” wiki page) in order to check off boxes. It exists to elicit periodic “oooh, neat” reactions. Idk, maybe a game about horrifying child abuse should aim for something a little bit more?