An Introduction #Permalink to this heading

I am not a massive lover of visual novels. I tend to enjoy them when I play them, but I don't usually go out of my way to experience the form. When Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo came out, I was intrigued by it, but I never did end up picking it up. I may, though, at this point because I greatly enjoyed the sequel in this mystery anthology series: Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse. I picked up The Mermaid's Curse primarily because I wanted to surprise my friend and cohost on The Worst Community Report, Bluzo. She was putting together a spoilercast for the game and I wanted to drop in having secretly completed the whole thing. I'm happy I did pick it up, though. I had a great time with it!

An Overview #Permalink to this heading

I found my time with the game to be remarkably smooth. I am not always the best puzzle solver out there, and we will return to that point in a moment, but I found my progress through the game remarkably unimpeded. The answers to puzzles were always available and easily retrievable from the files and profiles that the game provides. A lot of the information therein is duplicated from what characters have said, but a fair amount is new context and further reading that is interesting to go through even if it doesn't directly tie into the story. Many of the game's features are very user-friendly in this way. The dialogue system provides feedback when all conversation of a given topic or internal monologue about the scenery or characters has been seen. There is also generally clear feedback when you have seen everything that a chapter has had to offer. You can also resume basically any scene from key decision points if the path branches there, and each individual section of each chapter has that same checkmark if you have seen everything important from each section.

The visual and audio presentation of the game is also excellent. The musical variety and character posing may not be extravagant, but the developers truly make great use out of all of it. I normally do not like chromatic aberration or other effects meant to evoke the presentation of older technology, but I feel that it fits very well here considering the 1980s setting. I also feel the effects gel well with the extremely striking character portraits and unique background art style. I genuinely can't tell if the backgrounds are heavily edited panorama photographs or if they are excessively detailed illustrations. In my mind, both are likely and both are impressive. They are also a wonderful contrast from the character portraits, which sport bold, heavy outlines and extremely expressive body language and facial expressions. They aren't completely in an anime-style, nor are they completely realistic. Instead, they are an in-between style, similar to how the backgrounds are in between photo-realism and illustration. This is an extremely strong art style and I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves in future entries.

A Warning #Permalink to this heading

Here, we get to the true meat of the review. As a game primarily focused on story, this review would be woefully incomplete if I didn't address the twists and turns of the tale it is weaving. However! If you, dear reader, have any inkling that you will want to play The Mermaid's Curse, then stop reading here and go play it. I can easily provide a recommendation to play the game, even though it would not net a perfect score if such a numerical value was attached to the review you are reading. The game is complex enough that I have no hope of properly critiquing it without revealing major mechanical and narrative beats. If you do not care about these details being revealed, I shall remind you that this is a mystery game and a large part of what I think works and doesn't work about the game is tied up in the way that mystery is handled. I urge you to experience the mystery yourself rather than read my discussion of it.

Now, I trust that anyone left still reading either has no intention to play The Mermaid's Curse or has already done so, let us continue on into the depths.

A Complex Web #Permalink to this heading

As I have said before, the biggest part of this game from a critical standpoint is the narrative. For the most part, I think it works right up until the moment it doesn't. I was deeply invested for 90% of the runtime of the game. I felt like I was picking up the hints that the game was laying out for me as I went along, and discovering information at the same time as the characters. There are many pleasant spots where I could feel the game saying "This will be important later" and it was. It felt like basically no detail was truly unimportant and everything had a reason to be there. Even something as seemingly unimportant as feeling like Shotaro was probably going to be a villain at some point came back in fun and interesting ways later. So much of the game is about the process of the mystery. The second a skuzzball like Ikoma shows up on screen, you can tell he's going to be a villain at some point. The key is how we get there and how the characters figure that out through evidence gathering and good old fashioned detective work. This feeling is one I love to have in a mystery. It's the cathartic release of a detective knowing that the person sitting across from them is a criminal and slowly tightening a net around them until they slip up and can be properly caught. The mystery aspects of this game, especially those around the Curse of the Raging Waves and The Slashing Curse are handled very well and I got a lot of enjoyment out of them.

The game uses several narrative devices to make its story effective and also make the player's choices consistently in-universe. While some of them, like the branching path and spiritual identity of the player separate from any of the characters they are inhabiting work well, there is one that I feel falls completely flat and doesn't make any sense within the narrative as presented. Let's start with the positive here.

I love when a game interacts with the player directly separate from the characters they may be inhabiting. The way this game sets that up is by separating Yuza's head from his shoulders. Since Yuza is immortal, the consciousness that resided in that head remains left behind, as a disembodied spirit. This is a clever way to implant the Player in the story and offers a good reason for the linearity toward the first ending. Yuza's spirit gets a second chance to go back in time and start changing the future. This breaking of the fourth wall is extremely cool to me and I love it as a storytelling device. The problems begin to arise when this mechanic and story beat begin to interact with the rest of the game's secrets.

A Sputtering Conclusion #Permalink to this heading

Ultimately, the late-game story fumbles mirror the methods used to unlock those fumbles. I greatly enjoy the unusual mechanics used in the final puzzles of the game. Using the save system and the title screen in the way they do is extremely fun and I love the creativity. I just wish there was a little bit more pointing the player in the direction of the solutions. The Final Plan puzzle was very vague and offered a lot of options, more than basically any other puzzle in the game and expected you to only use two of the nine characters and pick specific abilities, of which we only see one in action during the events of the game. Similarly, the Mermaid puzzle right near the end relies on mechanics that were only vaguely hinted at in a way that was not obvious to me and I would not expect to be obvious to others. These pieces blindsiding the player right at the end only serve as resolution to the threads of the story I like the least by the end.

An unreliable narrator is often an interesting technique when used well. It can be used to keep the audience on their toes and encourage re-visitation of the work. I usually enjoy an unreliable narrator quite a bit, but I feel like it just doesn't work in this case. As we inhabit the thoughts and minds of several characters, we see the events unfold from multiple perspectives. However, both Yuza and Sato keep their true motivations quiet until the eleventh hour. They don't just hide this from the rest of the cast, but also from the player. It frankly just doesn't make sense for the secret information to remain secret for the amount of time it does in the game. Maybe the reason I balk at this aspect of the game is simply because so many other parts of the story are hinted at so effectively, where the secrets revealed late-game about Yuza and Sato feel like they come out of left field entirely.

The entire game sets up Yuza and Azami as being very close. I don't feel like I am alone in reading them as possibly having a relationship in their future. Or at least it felt several times like Yuza has romantic feelings for Azami. The sudden swerve to set up Yuza with Sato comes out of nowhere and feels like a very late addition to the story. While the pair do work together well eventually, it does feel like early playtests had people thinking Yuza and Azami were being paired up and there's no way Square Enix could possibly allow that. The heterosexuality is mandatory, here. The only possible relief we have when it comes to queer representation is the declaration that comes from Sobae the mermaid near the end that her and Mare Minakuchi were "more than friends." Their relationship, however, is never explored beyond that.

A Look Ahead #Permalink to this heading

Overall, even with my misgivings, I really enjoyed my time with The Mermaid's Curse. I'm very excited to go back to The Seven Mysteries of Honjo and am looking forward to whatever this team comes up with next. It feels like a rich world that could support a much larger anthology of games. Maybe I'm echoing peoples' thoughts about the first Paranormasight, but I'm very excited to see this series grow.