Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse Review – A Spine-Tingling Dive

Reviewed on:
PC

Platform:
Switch 2, Switch, PC

Publisher:
Square Enix

Developer:
Square Enix

Humanity has always been fascinated by the supernatural. Tall tales and legends persist through the ages, passed down through tradition and storytelling, for many reasons, whether parables, entertainment, or sometimes, bearing shreds of a greater truth. Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse is steeped in these concepts, throwing the player into an enthralling rural mystery filled with murder, betrayal, love, and curses.

The first game, 2023’s Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, quickly became a cult classic: a horror-thriller with dark themes, lots of dialogue, and strange puzzles that required creative solutions. Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse follows in those same footsteps. It’s an adventure game where you can hop between events and viewpoints in a timeline, tracking the events surrounding the small island town of Kameshima. Yuza, whose parents died in a disaster at sea years prior, has returned to the town to become a shellfish-gathering ama diver with the help of his friend Azami. A chance encounter with an apparition bearing his face, however, changes everything.

Alongside Yuza, there’s a memorable cast of characters who get wrapped up in the events on Kameshima and the nearby mainland. Tsukasa and Sato round out Yuza’s hometown friends, alongside several other free divers like Chie, Kikuko, and Yuza’s grandmother, Tsuyu.

Housewife-investigator Nameko and her psychic assistant Sado form a terrific detective duo, a dynamic that answers the question, what if an unassuming Columbo-esque detective partnered with a jujutsu sorcerer apprentice? Fantasy author Avi and the inquisitive Circe, meanwhile, act as a bit of comedic relief, even when their stories get incredibly heavy. All of them are beautifully illustrated in expressive 2D portraits set against the vibrant panoramas of each area. Paranormasight’s brush-stroke aesthetic feels timeless in the best ways.

The Mermaid’s Curse is built on slowly unspooling and unraveling its threads to uncover the mysteries beneath. It’s a slow start compared to most, even its predecessor; the story took a little while to get its hooks in me, but after several shocking revelations in a row, I was feverishly scribbling notes, jaw agape at what was unfolding. Director Takanari Ishiyama should become a household name for adventure fans.

Several tragedies are set to befall Kameshima, and by hopping around the events, progressing forward, and then leaping back through Recollections – a specific mechanic that opens up past memories to explore – you’ll need to figure out how to resolve all of them. The early parts of the story are a little heavy on Recollections, which can make it tough to keep track of characters and their individual drives.

It doesn’t take long for Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse to shift into higher gears, though. Quiet, peaceful, even mundane island life gives way to supernatural curses and mysterious deaths, and each focal-point character gets wrapped up in their own pursuits.

The mysteries are still as wonderfully head-scratching as the first game. Many of them pull off my favorite trick: asking you to name something – a character, place, or subject – without any multiple-choice answers or chance for coin-flipping guesswork. These solutions require scouring the menu’s Files and Profiles section, where deeper information about history, cultures, traditions, and more gets filed away for you to peruse like an in-game encyclopedia. The Mermaid’s Curse does a better job of directing you towards those answers than its predecessor, but it does typically ask you to deduce an answer. Its solutions are often obfuscated just enough to feel rewarding to uncover, without feeling like you’re hitting cognitive brick walls over and over.

There are also a few more tactile puzzles and interactive moments than before, too. The Paranormasight team doubles down on the effects of both its 360-degree panoramas and its adventure game format, adding more tangible objects and little UI bits that end up becoming revelatory tools in the right moment. My favorite is a hand mirror, used to great effect during a section where your character is trying to see if something is behind them.

It’s absolutely spine-tingling, and while The Mermaid’s Curse doesn’t have quite as many jump-scare moments as The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, it’s still a thrill-inducing adventure. Little noises and visual cues shoot ice through your veins, and even some of the mystery solutions involve putting yourself in terrifying positions to elicit new information.

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse honors the depth the adventure genre has had over the years. It’s easy for some to see a game where you primarily choose dialogue prompts and talk to characters as mechanically simple. However, The Mermaid’s Curse proves the powerful malleability of the adventure format, re-enacting psychic stand-offs and terrifying encounters with the otherworldly through seemingly conventional means. There’s a devilish glee in discovering a clue that’s been hidden under your nose the entire time, the kind of joy only found when the mundane becomes anything but.

And that’s where Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse hooked me, possibly more than its predecessor. Its lens narrows in to focus on a tighter, more intricately connected crew, but its supernatural tales ultimately become utterly human. What is immortality, truly? Why do we pine after myths and legends? What do the objects of our desires say about us, and what are we willing to do for them? And what do those pursuits turn us into, when the road comes to an end?

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse is a brilliant modern adventure game, filled with mysteries, delightful characters, and gorgeous art. Truly, I never thought we’d see a second Paranormasight; its predecessor felt like a one-off flight-of-fancy for Square Enix, destined to be a fond oddity for genre aficionados. Now, I can only hope there’s more in store.