slash

Heavy spoilers for Paranormasight, some spoilers for Kamaitachi no Yoru, and some small spoilers for Tokimeki Memorial and Metal Gear Solid

–

Sometimes when I play games I can tell exactly what games they were directly inspired by. Most of the time, I see this as a bad thing, because newer games are just recycling old concepts. However, sometimes instead of just repeating exactly what the previous games did, I’ll find a game that perfectly evolves their ideas. Paranormasight is my game of the year 2023. It HAS to be my game of the year 2023. Simply because it’s tricks are perfect expansions of the ideas presented in some of the best visual novels and adventure games of all time. The people who made this game were clearly heavily inspired by games like Famicom Detective Club, Kamaitachi no Yoru, and Portopia Serial Murder Case. In fact, let’s take a moment to talk about these “people who made this game.” Paranormasight was written by Takanari Ishiyama. Ishiyama is a relatively unknown developer, as he has primarily only worked on some Japanese mobile flip phone games. One of his first jobs as a developer was at Konami, where he did sound design for Tokimeki Memorial and Metal Gear Solid. Keep this in mind, as these games also heavily relate to Paranormasight. He wrote, directed, designed, and did the soundtrack for several games in the Tantei Kibukawa Ryōsuke Jikentan series. These are the mobile games I mentioned him working on before. Until recently, these games were unplayable, as there was no way to conveniently play them, unless you had an old japanese phone with one of them still downloaded. However, a developer called G-Mode has started recovering and rereleasing these old lost mobile games on Steam and Nintendo Switch. These games, of course, are still only in Japanese at the moment, but there are some translators who claim they will try to work on them when they can. Because they are still untranslated, I have not played them very much yet, but I can still see the same DNA found in Paranormasight. However, let’s first go back to Tokimeki Memorial and Metal Gear Solid. Tokimeki Memorial was one of the most important visual novels of the 90s. It is notable mainly for its countless random events and endings. Tokimeki Memorial also has a hidden, somewhat meta meaning hidden in it. Basically, to get the best ending, the game requires the player to break their immersion and force the best ending to happen, instead of letting you get whatever ending you get naturally. Metal Gear Solid was also one of the first games to proudly include 4th wall breaks in the main plot of the game. There’s one moment in MGS where the player must look at one of the pictures on the back of the game box to discover a hidden codec channel to progress in the game. There’s also the entire scene with Psycho Mantis. Psycho Mantis makes several comments and evaluations on you, the player, and the method for beating him also requires the player to break the 4th wall too. Psycho Mantis first evaluates you based on how many times you saved the game, how often you’ve died, and how often you’ve used healing items. Then, he accesses your memory card and talks about some of the games you’ve played. Finally, he claims he will move your controller with his mind. He asks you to put your controller on the ground, and then he makes the controller vibrate. The way to beat Psycho Mantis is you have to unplug your controller from port 1 and plug it into port 2. So both Tokimeki Memorial and Metal Gear Solid include 4th wall breaks, mainly from the player. The next projects Ishiyama worked on were the Tantei Kibukawa Ryōsuke Jikentan series games. The first game of this series begins with a case about somebody who died while playing a video game. Like I said, I haven’t played these games much yet, but I’m certain that this isn’t a coincidence. I heavily suspect that the case in the game will relate to the game itself at some point. After working on this series, Ishiyama stopped making games for over a decade. Finally, he made his big comeback with writing Paranormasight, and getting published by Square Enix. Paranormasight, his most recent project, is the culmination of every game he’s ever worked on, as well as a few games that directly inspired him. Paranormasight does things I haven’t seen done in games for decades. First, however, I have to talk about Paranormasight’s intro. This is one of the best intros I have ever seen in a video game. Miyamoto famously said that a game designer should create the first level of the game last. Ishiyama clearly agrees. Paranormasight begins without a title screen. Instead, it immediately jumps into a scene with a man standing next to a TV. He calls himself “The Storyteller.” He begins by telling you some basic things to keep in mind while playing the game. This ranges from general information about autosave and settings, to hints on how to solve puzzles found way later in the game. One of the hints he gives while explaining the mechanics of the game. He says you can change the audio levels in the settings, so if there’s “a voice you don’t want to hear,” you can turn it down. Paranormasight does not have voice acting. This is an extremely creative hint. This is a hint on how to solve the game’s first 4th wall break puzzle, found in the intro. To somebody playing the game for the first time, this will also immediately sound odd, making it more memorable. He makes another, much more subtle hint for a puzzle found later in the game right after saying this. In this game, there are curse stones that can kill people only when certain conditions are fulfilled. One of the first stones the player must go up against requires the player to hear a voice to fulfill its kill conditions. This is where the player must go into the settings, and turn down the voice volume. This is the first time you must break the 4th wall to solve a puzzle. The only way to know how to solve this is by remembering what the storyteller said in the intro. This, naturally, makes the player think back to everything else that the storyteller revealed. This is where the genius of Paranormasight is exposed. By remembering what the storyteller said in the intro that the player first didn’t think much of, the player realizes the second hint the storyteller provides. “Saving is a good way to keep your memories in place.” This hint is needed to solve a puzzle a couple hours after the voice volume puzzle, so the player will likely still remember this hint by then. Anyways, back to the intro: after giving basic information on the game, the storyteller “accidentally” reveals one final thing. He tells you about the main character, and then a news alert pops up on the tv, talking about the body of said protagonist being found in a park this morning. This is one of the first ways the game hooks the player. By revealing that the main character will end up dead by the morning, the player has certain expectations. The game forces the player to set these expectations just so that it can break them a few hours later. If the character you play as dies by the morning, and the story begins at evening, you would expect that the game only happens over the course of one night. However, at the end of the first night, the title screen happens, revealing that this was only the intro of the game. Then, the player must take control of several character’s storylines at once. So, what does the player learn from this game’s “first level?” Well, we learn that we must make the right decisions in one character’s story to progress in another character’s, the storyteller knows everything about the game, meaning he is separate from the main cast, and the player must break the 4th wall to solve some of the game’s puzzles. Also, by shattering the player’s first expectations of the game, the player is now prepared for the game to be much more than what you would originally think. Throughout the game, there are a few more 4th wall break puzzles. There’s one where you have to save the game to progress, and there’s one where you have to learn something from playing one character’s story and then go to another character’s story to use that information. These are some pretty creative kinds of puzzles for an adventure game, but the game’s ending is what really made me confident this is my game of the year. At the end of the game, the storyteller explains that there are three parts of this ancient spirit or whatever: the mind, the body, and the soul. This is where Ishiyama makes a direct reference to Kamaitachi no Yoru. The storyteller asks you to type in the names of each of the parts. The body is the main character, Shogo. The soul appeared at the beginning of the game as a strange floating orb. The mind is you, the player. The only other game I know of that boldly asks the player to literally type in the exact name of an unknown character is in Kamaitachi no Yoru’s “good” ending. At the beginning of the game, the storyteller asks the player what they would do if they had the power to bring somebody back from the dead. He gives you a few options: I would use it if it had no cost, I would use it even if it meant killing somebody, I would give it to somebody else, etc. During the ending, the storyteller asks again: what would you do if you had the power to bring somebody back to life? However, this time, he adds a new choice: I would destroy it. If you choose this option, he says this was his original intention when showing you this story. When the player types their own name in, and the storyteller explains that you are a character in the story, but you just had amnesia, Paranormasight is making a direct nod to Spike Chunsoft. As I said in a previous post, Spike Chunsoft games went from making the player break the 4th wall to beat the game, to incorporating 4th wall breaks into the context of the story itself. Here, Ishiyama is doing the same thing. The player thinks the whole time that they were being forced to break the 4th wall to progress through the game, akin to what happens in Kamaitachi. However, the ending of Paranormasight reveals that the player’s actions had context within the story, so they technically weren’t really 4th wall breaks. By doing this, Paranormasight has referenced both old and new Chunsoft games, as well as calling back to every game Ishiyama has ever worked on. Let’s review: Tokimeki Memorial requires the player to break their own immersion to get the best ending. Metal Gear Solid requires the player to acknowledge that they are playing a video game, after witnessing some 4th wall breaks from Psycho Mantis. The first game in the Tantei Kibukawa Ryōsuke Jikentan series immidiately begins with a case about somebody who mysteriously died while playing a video game. This is a reference to the fact that the player is currently playing a video game, as well. Paranormasight includes literally every trick from every game Ishiyama has touched. By the way, we still don’t know the full context of Paranormasight. The original Japanese title of Paranormasight is PARANORMASIGHT: FILE 23. Also, Ishiyama has said in an interview that he plans to make more games in the Paranormasight series. “File 23” implies that this is not the first story in a series, but I’m pretty sure that if they make more games in the series, the story will not be directly related to the seven mysteries of Honjo. This means that the interactions with the storyteller are part of a larger context that we don’t know about yet. Anyways, the main reason why Paranormasight is my game of the year 2023 is because of the storyteller asking the player to type in the names of characters, making sure you have actually solved the whole mystery. I’ve never seen any other game do something like this besides Kamaitachi no Yoru. The fact that Ishiyama has the guts to try this in 2023, and succeed at it, proves to me that there will be no other game like Paranormasight to release this year.