Category: video games

Speed Dating for Ghosts

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Originally released on Valentine’s Day in 2018, Speed Dating for Ghosts is a short and simple roleplaying visual novel (or rather, visual short story collection) in which you can date your choice of nine ghosts. The version currently available on Steam, on Switch, and on Itchio includes the “Go to Hell” expansion, which includes three more postgame ghosts to date and an epilogue in the form of a beach party in Hell.

You play as yourself. Presumably you are dead, and also a ghost. You have registered for a speed dating event that is, predictably, run by a ghost. At this event, you choose between three rooms, each of which contains three ghosts. You have two short conversations with each of the three ghosts. If a ghost likes you, you can go on a date with them. Thankfully, it’s not difficult to convince the ghosts to warm up to you, and you can go on a date with all of them without having to replay the initial conversations.

These “dates,” such as they are, involve helping each ghost take care of their unfinished business. Instead of romancing the ghosts, what you’re really trying to do is learn their stories. After you complete a date, you’re rewarded with more information about the ghost via a character sheet on the “Graveyard” page of the game’s main menu. Once you date the first nine ghosts, you’re given the option to visit Hell for postgame content.

The gameplay consists of choosing between dialog options and being friendly. The art is simple and stylized but manages to achieve a good balance of creepy and cute. The writing is wonderful.

For me, playing through one speed dating room + going on three dates took about 25 minutes. Technically, you can convince a ghost not to date you, but I don’t know why you’d do this. All of the dialog choices make sense, and I can’t imagine needing to use a walkthrough. The postgame content is a bit trickier, and two of the ghosts in Hell might require some extra effort to date. The third ghost in Hell is a dog, and you can pet him. I love him forever.

Aside from the ghost dog, I’m also a fan of Spooky Peter, the plague doctor ghost who’s been around for centuries and has found a vocation in frightening the living. If you agree to apprentice under him, he inducts you into one of the more arcane mysteries of the afterlife, and I appreciated the worldbuilding of his story. There are also two older ghosts (Vera and Gary) who were involved in murder mysteries, and both of their plot arcs are fantastic. One of these stories was so emotionally satisfying that it made me tear up a little, while the other thoroughly creeped me out.

Speed Dating for Ghosts is a fun collection of short stories tied together by an interesting framing device, and I enjoyed the two hours I spent with it. Based on the dry tone of its humor, I’d say that the game is aimed at a mature audience, but there’s nothing particularly grim or edgy or upsetting about it. The writing and art contain elements of horror, but they’re very mild. I didn’t know what to expect from Speed Dating for Ghosts, and I was surprised by how creative and clever it is. It’s always a pleasure to find a weird little game like this that uses the medium to craft a unique and engaging piece of storytelling.

The Best Wells in Tears of the Kingdom

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

“The Best Wells in Tears of the Kingdom” is a series of short travelogue essays celebrating the hidden secrets, environmental storytelling, and understated exploration elements of Tears of the Kingdom.

One of my main criticisms of Breath of the Wild was that its world felt curiously flat. Why wasn’t Link allowed to go underground? What was lurking underneath Hyrule?

When I first discovered that Tears of the Kingdom was filled with wells and caves, I made it my mission to track them all down. Ganondorf would just have to wait. I’m currently taking my time and leisurely enjoying myself as I go cave diving, but I managed to locate all 58 wells before completing the first dungeon. Each of these wells is unique, but what I’ve been most impressed by are the small stories told by the characters who’ve found themselves at the bottom of a well by accident – or by choice.

For the record, these are my favorites:

1. Kakariko Village Well
2. Haran Lakefront Well
3. Rikoka Hills Well
4. Popla Foothills South Well
5. Kara Kara Bazaar Well
6. Zelda’s Secret Well

You can find the annotated list on AO3 here:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/48633913/chapters/122678209

The cover illustration for this piece, which depicts the veteran well explorer Fera, was created by the magical MiroiMirage. You can find their lively and colorful artwork on Twitter (here) and on Instagram (here). It was a joy and an honor to work with Miroi while getting a glimpse into their creative process. All of the groundwork they laid for the final painted illustration was amazing, so much so that I’d like to share one of their preliminary sketches, which you can see (here).

You’re Not Lost, You’re Here!

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Plenty of people want to leave Possum Springs. But what about the people who are happy to stay? “You’re Not Lost, You’re Here!” is a linked trio of short stories about a day in the life of the strange little town of Possum Springs. Mae’s aunt Molly reflects on the eeriness of depopulation, Mae’s father Stan fantasizes about breaking corporate windows, and Mae’s mother Candy wonders what her daughter will see when she returns home with nightmare eyes.  

Something Night in the Woods does really well, I think, is to offer the player an opportunity to glimpse into the lives of people whose perspectives might be difficult to understand out of context. To give an example, Mae hates the police and teases her Aunt “Mall Cop” Molly with more than touch of hostility, but why would Molly have wanted to become a police officer in the first place? Why would Mae’s father, a former factory technician, embrace worker solidarity but still distrust unions? And why would Mae’s mother, who doesn’t necessarily believe in God, feel such a strong connection to the Possum Springs church that she runs its business office?

It’s easy enough to sympathize with Mae and Bea and Gregg and Angus, whose attitudes of progressive Millennial cosmopolitanism presumably reflect the player’s own, but I think the older characters in Night in the Woods are just as interesting and compelling. I come from a working-class background myself, and I wanted to try to make these secondary characters more relatable as the heroes of their own stories.

You can read this trio of vignettes on AO3 here:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/49029619

I wrote this piece for At the End of Everything, a Night in the Woods fanzine. Their website on Carrd is (here), and you can check out everyone’s artwork on Twitter (here) and on Tumblr (here). If you’re interested in ordering a copy of the zine, leftover sales are open throughout August.

I had the pleasure of working on an illustration with the brilliant and multitalented Wolf Godwin. You can find his art and photography on Instagram (here), his animations on YouTube (here), and his music on Soundcloud (here). Wolf has written lovely piano versions of several songs from the Night in the Woods OST, so please check out his work if you’d like to indulge in some fun and eerie autumn vibes.

Trinity Trigger

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Trinity Trigger, an action JRPG published by Xseed Games in April 2023, is essentially Secret of Mana with a fresh coat of paint. The story is simple. The combat is simple. The dungeons are simple. There’s a rudimentary crafting system, and it’s simple as well. I love this simplicity, which allows you to enjoy the game in the same way that you might enjoy scenery from a train window. Not everything has to be complicated, and Trinity Trigger is a wonderful title for people who play games to relax.

You control three heroes, each of whom can wield a set of weapons chosen via a ring menu, just like Secret of Mana. Some enemies are vulnerable to certain weapons, but these vulnerabilities aren’t a big deal outside of boss fights.

Unlike Secret of Mana, you don’t need to grind for weapon upgrades, which are unlocked automatically at the end of each dungeon. There are a few sidequests that involve backtracking in order to fight a slightly stronger enemy variation, but these aren’t necessary for staying ahead of the gentle difficulty curve. Trinity Trigger is slightly more complicated than I’m giving it credit for, but not by much, and it’s no trouble to figure out the various character optimization systems as you go.

If I were to offer any criticism of the game, I might point out that the AI of the characters you’re not directly controlling isn’t great, but this doesn’t really matter. The voice acting isn’t great either, but you can turn it off. There are a few short anime-style animated cutscenes, and they don’t include English subtitles if you’ve got the voice language set to Japanese. This is an unfortunate oversight, but it’s not as if the cutscenes contain important information about the story, which is largely immaterial.

This story, such as it is, involves a pair of deities enmeshed in an endless war. In order to avoid decimating the world, they’ve agreed to fight through human proxy warriors. The factions of both gods want this cycle to end. Your main viewpoint character, who has been chosen as one god’s proxy warrior, is therefore joined by two warriors from the opposite faction.

Even if they never intend to fight anyone, your party still journeys from one dungeon to the next in order to collect mystical weapons. These dungeons are actually giant weapons once wielded by the gods, and their magic spills out into the environment, causing diverse biomes to exist in close proximity. The snowy mountain biome is right next to the desert biome, for example. The game is fairly linear, so you progress from one biome to the next while wondering what climate is going to be around the next corner.

In many ways, Trinity Trigger reminds me of I Am Setsuna, a game I also enjoyed. The primary purpose of I Am Setsuna was to recapture the simplicity of the combat system of Chrono Trigger, which felt especially satisfying given how complicated and arcane JRPG combat systems had become in the 2010s. In the same way, Trinity Trigger is all about creating a frame for the basic combat loop of Secret of Mana while adding a few small quality-of-life updates.

Along with the simplicity of its combat, a significant part of what made Secret of Mana so lovely was how beautiful and green its world was. As an early Super Nintendo game, Secret of Mana didn’t have great writing, nor were the characters even remotely well-developed. In Secret of Mana, an evil empire wants to cut down a magical tree, and you must save the tree. The evil empire is evil, of course, and they must be stopped. The empire is never presented as a real threat, however. The reason you keep going in Secret of Mana, and the reason you care about the Mana Tree, is because the world is filled with gorgeous variations on the “forest” environment. There are sunlight-drenched peaceful forests and dark labyrinthine forests and lush autumn forests and sparse alpine forests and fantastic mushroom forests and glittering winter forests and forests with pink cherry blossom petals floating on the breeze.

Like Secret of Mana, the writing in Trinity Trigger is passable but not worth remarking on. Instead, the storytelling of the game is broadly conveyed through its environment. What would it mean if the natural environment stopped following natural patterns? What would it look like if lakes and rivers dried up and forests disappeared? What if natural disasters became an everyday occurrence? In Trinity Trigger, an environmental apocalypse is underway, but it’s happening very slowly. Your characters are doing their best to stop it, but that’s not really the point. Rather, what Trinity Trigger wants is for you to enjoy how the wind rustles the leaves and how the sunlight sparkles on the sand.

Basically, in Trinity Trigger, you run around colorful environments and attack colorful enemies with colorful weapons while watching various sets of numbers go up. There’s not much to say about the game save that it’s uncomplicated and fun to play, and I enjoyed the twenty hours I spent with it. I have nothing but respect and appreciation for a solid and well-made 7/10 game that knows what it’s doing and does it well, and I’m always up for saving some trees.

We Know the Devil

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

We Know the Devil
https://pillowfight.itch.io/we-know-the-devil

We Know the Devil is a horror-themed visual novel about three teenagers at summer camp. Although the world of the game is close to our own, there are a few differences, one of which is that “the devil” is real. One of the kids’ duties as campers is to reinforce the magical wards protecting a forest, and your job as the player is to help them make it through the night. We Know the Devil has four endings; and, depending on how quickly you read, it takes about thirty to forty minutes to finish a run.

Since you can’t get the true ending on your first playthrough, I might recommend going into the game without consulting a guide, but only if you’re the sort of person who absolutely can’t tolerate any spoilers whatsoever. We Know the Devil functions primarily at an allegorical level, and you’ll get infinitely more out of its story if you understand what’s going on. In this post, I’m not going to spoil what happens, but I think it makes sense to accurately describe the game’s premise.  

We Know the Devil is divided into ten short chapters. For the most part, the game is entirely linear. The only element of gameplay is that the player is required to make seven choices, and these choices only affect the ending. Essentially, the player is put into the shoes of one of the three main characters and given a choice between the other two characters. The ending you get is determined by which of the three kids is left out of the pairings the most frequently. Essentially, you’re choosing who dies at the end (although they don’t actually die).

To get the true ending, you have to balance the pairings evenly. Unfortunately, you can’t do this on your first playthrough, as the game doesn’t give you the key choice that makes a perfect balance possible. The first ending you get will therefore be strange and upsetting, but it’s the unpleasantness of this ending that serves as the cipher for decoding the allegory.

A major weakness of We Know the Devil is that the setting of the game is poorly defined to an extreme degree. Unless you understand the allegory, it’s difficult to piece together what’s going on. This confusion is exacerbated by the inanity of the character dialog, a great deal of which is trite chatter. In fact, some of the writing feels like a parody of an indie comic about depressed edgy teens, and my first playthrough of the game left me cold.

Although the horror elements were intriguing, I didn’t understand the larger narrative. Why were these kids at camp if they didn’t want to be there? If they had cellphones, didn’t they have cars? Why couldn’t they just leave? Why were they refusing to communicate with each other? If “the devil” is real, why were teenagers being forced to patrol the woods at night? Were they conducting some sort of ritual? And for what purpose?

None of these questions is answered, and the first ending I got didn’t make much sense in terms of plot, character development, or narrative themes. I couldn’t figure out why people have lavished so much praise on this game since its initial release in 2015, so I googled “We Know the Devil ending explained.” That’s when the story became much more interesting.

Essentially, each of the three main viewpoint characters represents a different type of queer identity. The ways in which these characters fail to communicate with one another are representations of how young people attempt to keep themselves in the closet, and the way in which “the devil” gets one of them at the end is a representation of how a secret queer identity might manifest in an unhealthy way. The summer camp is supposed to be analogous to a Christian camp for “problem teens,” and the ritual night in the woods is an analogy for how such organizations put campers in difficult situations in order to break them emotionally, after which they can be “fixed.” If you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend (this fantastic essay), which unpacks what’s going on in We Know the Devil from the perspective of someone close to the culture and experience being portrayed.  

To me, the queer identities of the characters were obvious from the start. Still, a character being gay or trans is completely normal to me here in 2023, and I know very little about Christianity in the United States. All of the allegory therefore went completely over my head. Once I picked up on what everything was supposed to represent, all of the seemingly random symbology started to make sense and fit together nicely.

Admittedly, the allegory is clever. Still, I wish the story stood better on its own, especially for players who don’t come from that particular cultural background. All that aside, I enjoyed the game’s gentle and sketchy visual portrayals of its characters, and the descriptive writing that frames their conversations is quite good and occasionally even beautiful. In addition, the ambient music that underscores the game is gorgeous and used to fantastic effect. On the whole, I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to experience the story told by We Know the Devil, but I wish I’d done myself a favor and read more about its cultural context first.

The Suicide of Rachel Foster

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a suspense thriller in the form of a walking sim that takes about three hours to play. The game has moderate elements of horror, and the relationship between the player-character’s father and the teenage girl he groomed is a key part of the story.

This is a difficult game to recommend, as I’m not sure its merits outweigh its flaws. These flaws aren’t necessarily related to the story, which is engaging despite its sensitive themes. Rather, The Suicide of Rachel Foster has major gameplay issues that will probably be a turn-off for anyone who isn’t already a veteran fan of walking sims. In other words, The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a very walking-simy walking sim, and I think it’s safe to say that people who aren’t interested in the premise probably won’t get a lot out of the game.

That being said, the premise is a banger: Your dad was the manager of what is essentially the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, and you get trapped in the hotel by a snowstorm while inspecting the property after your dad’s death. As you poke around mementos of the past, a terrible family secret comes to light, and it’s entirely possible that you’re not as alone in the building as you were led to believe.

The Suicide of Rachel Foster begins when the player character, Nicole, gets a letter from her late mother, who hired a lawyer to deliver the document to her on the event of her father’s death. Ten years ago, when Nicole was 16, her mother took her to Portland when she left her father and the hotel in Montana they managed together. Nicole’s father had been pursuing an affair with one of Nicole’s classmates, the eponymous Rachel Foster. Rachel became pregnant and committed suicide by jumping off a cliff in the mountains.

The Timberline Hotel struggled on for another six years but closed in 1989, and Nicole’s father continued to live there for another four years before committing suicide himself. It’s now 1993, but everything in the hotel is more or less how it was when Nicole left in 1983 – including, creepily enough, her childhood bedroom. Regardless, the elements have taken their toll on the building, and Nicole is legally required to perform an in-person inspection before she has her father’s lawyer sell the property to a hotel chain.

Thankfully, the hotel still has hot water and electricity. Nicole is connected via a very chunky cellphone to a man named Irving, who identifies himself as a FEMA agent who’s been assigned to monitor her situation. Irving cautions Nicole not to leave during the snowstorm, and he helps guide her through the hotel so that she can keep the lights on and the water running during the emergency.

Oddly enough, Irving seems a little too helpful, and maybe just a little too available. He explains that he’s been a member of the small-town community since he was a child, but perhaps he knows a bit too much about the history of her family. Nicole is suspicious of Irving at first; but, the longer she’s stuck in the hotel, the more she comes to trust him. Despite Irving’s misgivings, Nicole starts to investigate the death of Rachel Foster, and she begins to suspect that perhaps the girl didn’t commit suicide after all.

While Nicole is stuck in the hotel for nine days, the player is tasked with finding the answers to three questions. What happened to Rachel ten years ago? What does Irving know that he isn’t telling you? And something is clearly strange about the hotel – what’s going on there?

While The Suicide of Rachel Foster presents an intriguing set of intertwined mysteries, the performance of Nicole’s voice actress rubbed me the wrong way. Nicole comes off like a whisky-slinging, battle-hardened intergalactic bounty hunter, which is an odd approach to the character. Nicole is only 26 years old, and she’s something of a blank slate. She doesn’t seem to have a job, or friends, or interests, or hobbies, or even practical knowledge concerning how to maintain the hotel. To me, it didn’t feel like Nicole’s badass attitude is earned, and it grated on my nerves.

In addition, one of the main thematic questions of the game doesn’t mean anything to me. Can you still love your dead father if he abused your mother, seduced and impregnated your teenage friend, and then didn’t contact you for ten years? Like… no?? At the very least, this is a complicated issue that would have required much more heavy lifting than the game’s script was willing to do.

Thankfully, what’s going on with Irving is far more interesting, and his voice actor gives an incredible performance that made me feel way more sympathy toward his character than perhaps I should have.

In any case, the game is primarily concerned with creating an atmosphere of slowly mounting dread.

Unfortunately, Nicole walks at a glacial pace, which makes it a pain to explore the hotel. The map you’re given isn’t terribly useful when you have it, and Nicole loses it halfway through the game. The location of your objectives isn’t clear, and there’s a lot of extraneous space with no plot relevance. It’s easy to get lost, and there are no nudges to help get you back on the critical path.

Because you move so incredibly slowly, I ultimately gave up on free exploration and used a walkthrough, this one (here). There’s nothing wrong with using a walkthrough, of course, but I wish it weren’t necessary.

I should note that you can run, but this is also a pain. To run in the Nintendo Switch version of the game, you have to exert force to press down the left joystick as you move it. This is extremely awkward and uncomfortable. To put it bluntly, it’s an obvious accessibility issue that doesn’t need to exist.

Also, you’re occasionally given dialog choices that don’t make much sense. You’ll choose one thing, and then Nicole will say something else. These choices are timed for some inexplicable reason, and what you say doesn’t have any impact on the plot.

This makes it all the more confusing when you’re given a choice that does matter at the end of the game, which is whether or not to allow Nicole to commit suicide. This is a weird choice to have, to be honest, especially since there’s nothing about Nicole that indicates she’s depressed or suicidal. Again, the player doesn’t know anything about her, and nothing that happened in the past is her fault. Even if you don’t allow her to commit suicide, I don’t understand the “good” ending, which doesn’t make any logical or emotional sense.

I know this seems like a lot of criticism, but it’s worth repeating that the game isn’t that long, and its main focus is on creating a creepy narrative atmosphere to accompany its lovingly rendered spatial environment. You can probably finish the story in two and a half hours if you use a walkthrough from the beginning and don’t get stupidly lost like I did, and the gameplay issues might not bother someone more inured to the idiosyncrasies of walking sims.

I have to admit that I never really warmed up to Nicole or felt any sympathy for her sexpest father, but Irving grew on me. The intertwined stories of what happened to Rachel Foster and what’s currently going on in the hotel are extremely intriguing, as is the physical environment of the hotel itself.

I’m a huge fan of The Shining, both the Stephen King novel and the Stanley Kubrick film, and it was cool to see what the “staff only” spaces of a place like the Overlook might actually look like, from the caretaker apartments to the boiler room to the industrial kitchen freezer to the utility crawlspaces. Mercifully, there are no elevators in the Timberline Hotel, but the carpeted hallways are plenty spooky enough. There’s also a secret underground passage with a secret room. I consider myself to be a connoisseur of secret basement rooms, and this one gave me serious chills.

If you’re not sold on The Suicide of Rachel Foster but curious about where it goes with its premise, I’d recommend checking out the Wikipedia article (here), which contains a detailed plot synopsis. I think The Suicide of Rachel Foster probably would have made a better novel, but there’s also something to be said for the experience of being able to walk through the hotel while hearing every creak of the floorboards and every rattle of the pipes in the walls. If nothing else, the sound design is amazing, and the dev team clearly put a lot of love and care into creating an immersive setting.

So, in conclusion, while The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a difficult game to recommend to everyone, I personally very much enjoyed being drawn into the strange and horrible story of the Timberline Hotel.

Varré’s Bouquet

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Deep under the Royal Capital of Leyndell, the cursed Omen son of Queen Marika bides his time within a prison of shadows. When the ambitious young surgeon Varré is summoned to attend to Mohg’s crown of horns, the two men forge a close bond, yet Varré can do nothing as the shining prince Miquella tempts Mohg with tales of a frightful power hidden within the dark hollows of the earth. As the Lands Between fall to ruin, Varré realizes the wisdom of Miquella’s dream, and he once again offers himself to Mohg, along with his love – and his blood.

While sweating through a set of analytical essays and academic book reviews earlier this year, I amused myself by writing a short story about the two worst characters in Elden Ring, White Mask Varré and Luminary Mohg. They’re both terrible people, but I’m intrigued by the unwritten backstory of their relationship. Because Varré is so unapologetically supportive of Mohg’s evil schemes, the pair has become the subject of a number of silly tongue-in-cheek memes (this one on Tumblr is probably of my favorite), but I followed my heart and wrote unironic gay monster romance. Game Rant may have called Mohg the “worst LGBT+ representation,” but I think he and Varré are adorable.

My story is complete at 3,800 words, and you can read it on AO3 here:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/46268107/chapters/116484187

I consider myself extremely lucky to have been able to work with Paristandard to create an illustration for the story. Along with Elden Ring, they also draw fan art for Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, and their original comics and character designs are fantastic. You can find their work on Twitter (here) and on Instagram (here).

Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo

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Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is a supernatural thriller set in the Honjo neighborhood of Sumida Ward in central Tokyo during the 1980s. This visual novel’s story is told via the intersecting perspectives of three main protagonists through a series of short episodes laid out along a story grid. Although you have some choice regarding the order in which you play the episodes, the story is linear, with minor branching paths leading to premature endings. Paranormasight has strong elements of horror, as well as a few jumpscares, but it’s sensitive about its use of mature themes and graphic visual imagery. Depending on how quickly you read, it should take about ten to twelve hours to unlock all of the endings.

Let me cut to the chase: I really enjoyed Paranormasight and would happily recommend it even to people who aren’t horror fans. The game only has a moderate level of interactivity, so I’m not sure it would appeal to people who dislike visual novels. That being said, Paranormasight is at the height of its genre, and it’s as well-written, well-illustrated, and intriguingly presented as a visual novel can get.

A quick description of the story is going to sound like anime nonsense, but please take my word for it that this is a story written for an adult audience and bear with me for a moment.

During the early modern Edo period, an onmyōji wizard found the secret to a ritual that would bring someone back from the dead. In order to recreate the soul of the deceased, one would need to store sufficient “soul dregs” of murder victims inside a ritual object. The wizard managed to perform the ritual, a process that resulted in nine deaths. The history of these deaths has survived to the present in the form of urban legends about the “seven mysteries of Honjo.”

Late one night, ritual objects in the form of wooden netsuke charms mysteriously appear in the hands of nine people in the Honjo neighborhood. In addition to the physical charms, these “curse bearers” have inherited the resentful memories of the victims of the original ritual, as well as the power to kill others with a curse, which they’re able to trigger when certain conditions are met. If one of the curse bearers manages to kill enough people, they’ll be able to perform the ritual of resurrection – but only if another curse bearer doesn’t kill them first.

Paranormasight opens with a stand-alone prologue in which one of the curse bearers meets a gruesome end. When the prologue is concluded, the story is taken up by three more curse bearers: a grieving mother whose young son died in a kidnapping incident, a high school girl whose best friend committed suicide, and a senior police detective assigned to investigate the mysterious death of a youth truancy officer. All three of these protagonists are sympathetic, as is the companion character accompanying each of them. As the story unfolds, they gradually begin to work together in an attempt to figure out what’s happening so that they can survive the curse while preventing more murders.

I feel like I’ve spent years quietly waiting for Square Enix to start publishing visual novels, and I’m happy it’s finally happening. Visual novels are somewhat infamous for being relatively inexpensive to make, and it’s so cool to see one of these games with big-budget production values. Although the art and music are wonderful, the high quality of Paranormasight mainly comes through in the strength of its writing, its manga-style mise-en-scène, and its excellent translation.  

When I talk about the mise-en-scène, I’m referring to the cinematic framing of each scene. While many visual novels will show you a visually flat illustration of a character superimposed on top of a static background, Paranormasight puts a great deal of effort into making conversations feel more dynamic, with the camera following standard “line of sight” rules to show the player the conversation from different angles and perspectives. As a result, Paranormasight feels like reading a manga instead of reading an illustrated novel. This framing isn’t overly dramatic and doesn’t draw attention to itself, but it must have required an incredible amount of planning and effort to pull off with such skill and variety.

The same goes for the writing. The writing doesn’t go out of its way to appear “brilliant,” but the way the various threads of the characters gradually become woven into the larger story is incredible. Although you’ll often have to finish one character’s current storyline before continuing another’s, I was impressed by how the game maintains its forward momentum while still giving the player a fair amount of freedom to move between characters and conversation topics. I also appreciate how none of the characters ever devolves into a stereotype, and how both major and minor characters have a balanced mixture of admirable and problematic personality traits.

On a lark, I downloaded Paranormasight onto my older Nintendo Switch and played the prologue in Japanese. I can therefore say with confidence that the English translation is excellent. The translation team preserves the flavor of the original writing through canny localization choices, especially regarding the game’s more arcane vocabulary. I’ve been annoyed with the translation of Tears of the Kingdom, which is filled with nonsense like “Ultrahand” and “secret stones,” so I admire how the English version of Paranormasight manages to make its more unusual terms seem perfectly natural.  

Despite its goofy name and slightly silly supernatural premise, Paranormasight was created for an audience of intelligent adults. The game is very much mass-market entertainment published by a giant corporation, so perhaps it’s not as bold or edgy as it could be, but I actually think this market concession to “broad appeal” is a blessing. Sometimes it’s nice to read a horror thriller that has the confidence not to rely on sexual assault, fantastically grotesque violence, or poorly-disguised bigotry against minorities. As a fun bonus, there are no creepy “male gaze” character designs, just a wide range of character types who are drawn in an appealing anime-influenced style but still look like real people.

Paranormasight was developed in cooperation with the Sumida City Tourism Association, and the game does a fantastic job of giving the player a sense of its setting. This works especially well in tandem with the story’s theme of how many Japanese urban legends are closely connected to a specific place and the history of the people who live there. Although most of the gameplay involves choosing how to advance the conversation, there are also moments when the player is invited to explore an area via a visual panorama while investigating points that catch their attention. It’s fun to explore this weird little neighborhood in Sumida that’s been around since the Edo period, and you never feel as though you’re on the receiving end of a history lecture.

One of the coolest aspects of Paranormasight is its framing device, in which a narrator wearing an Edo-period kimono and a half-face Noh mask directly addresses the player. This narrator invites the player to watch the story through a Shōwa-era color television, one of the bulky cathode-ray screens embedded in its own piece of furniture.

The menu has a great time with this retro aesthetic, distorting the background with tv “noise” and curving the screen at the edges. From the menu, you can access an annotated index with entries for the characters, places, and historical incidents that appear in the story. Each entry is accompanied by an illustration and two or three paragraphs of text. I generally don’t bother with the annotated indices in visual novels, but the one in Paranormasight is especially well-written and edited to provide a satisfying amount of intriguing information without overwhelming the player with walls of text. I also love that the entries for the urban legends are illustrated with period-accurate woodblock prints.

For someone with my particular set of interests, Paranormasight is a 10/10 game. Even if you’re not into urban history or urban legends, I still think the strength of the game’s writing and the cleverness of its design are strong selling points. You can download Paranormasight as a phone app, but it’s perfect for Nintendo Switch’s handheld mode and well worth the $20.

By the way, if you’re intrigued by the concept of “virtual tourism through a visual novel,” I’d also like to recommend the supernatural mystery thriller Root Letter. Its story is set in the small city of Matsue in rural Shimane prefecture, which is also famous for its Edo-period urban legends. Root Letter is very good, but it’s nowhere near as polished as Paranormasight. Square Enix really hit it out of the park with this one.

Fishing Vacation Review on Sidequest

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

I’m excited to have published my first video game review for Sidequest! I had the opportunity to write about Fishing Vacation, a Game Boy horror adventure game from 2020 that was released for Nintendo Switch at the beginning of June. Here’s an excerpt from my review…

What intrigued me about Fishing Vacation wasn’t necessarily its atmosphere of creeping horror, but rather how its story provides a critical perspective on the fantasy of “getting away from everything to live in nature.” During the prologue, your friend jokes about having quit his job, but there’s a sense of unease to his cheerfulness that’s later reflected in his nightmares. I imagine that many people harassed by the pressures of a prolonged economic recession have experienced similar anxieties, and perhaps many of us have entertained a similar fantasy of dropping everything to disappear into the woods. Fishing Vacation forces the player to confront the unpleasant consequences of cutting oneself off from society.

You can read the full review on the Sidequest website here:
https://sidequest.zone/2023/06/19/review-fishing-vacation-dredges-up-unwholesome-summer-fun/

The Witch’s House

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

The Witch’s House is an RPG Maker gothic horror game from 2012 that was released as a remastered edition for Nintendo Switch in October 2022. The game consists of cute environmental puzzles presented in gorgeous 16-bit pixel graphics, and it’s brutally violent in an over-the-top and almost cartoonish way. It takes about fifty minutes to play if you’re good at video game puzzles, and maybe an hour and twenty minutes if you need to consult a guide like I did.

You play as Viola, a 13yo girl who finds herself alone in the woods outside a mysterious mansion. A black cat greets her and invites her to wait inside until her father comes to pick her up, thereby trapping her within a hungry and malicious labyrinth. Your job is to find a way to escape the house while learning the story of the girl who lives there, a young witch named Ellen.

The game drops you right into the action with very little preamble. Within sixty seconds, you’re inside the house. Within another sixty seconds, you’ve probably already died for the first time. I was shocked and delighted by how graphic this first death was. Viola’s deaths become more horrendous and creative as you get deeper into the house, and the main appeal of the game is seeing all the fun ways this cute anime girl can die.   

With one or two exceptions, surviving the traps isn’t a matter of reflexes. Instead, the game asks you to solve simple puzzles by interacting with the environment. The house is divided into five floors, and each floor is further divided into discrete suites of rooms associated with a specific puzzle sequence. Only the fifth and final floor has enough moving parts to necessitate consulting an online guide; and, for the most part, it’s fairly easy to figure out what you need to do. 

Of course, you can always choose to do something else just to see what will happen. The Witch’s House rewards exploration and experimentation with especially gruesome deaths. My favorite death is when Viola gets eaten by a grand piano. There’s a nice discordant crunch when the lid slams down, and I appreciate how blood oozes from the cracks.

On the game’s opening menu screen, you can choose to play in an “Easy” mode that will allow you to respawn at the start of the room where you died. When you finish the game, you’ll unlock an “Extra” mode that adds more objects and text to the environment while slightly increasing the complexity of the puzzles. Despite the fact that the Extra mode and the Easy mode are mutually exclusive, I enjoyed replaying The Witch’s House with the added difficulty. You can interact with just about everything you see on screen, and the flavor text is terse yet interesting. The house is like a murder playground, and it’s fun to wander around while triggering various awful scenarios.

The game’s story is self-contained and satisfying. There are two extra endings unlocked by meeting special challenge conditions (which aren’t a big deal in Easy mode), and they both add horrifying context to the default ending. Apparently, there’s also a fourth ending where the house simply allows you to leave if you wait in the foyer for an hour of real time. I’m not going to do that, of course, but that’s a neat concept.

For me, The Witch’s House was $15 and two hours well spent. I think some people might complain about how the spooky atmosphere of the game relies a bit too heavily on jumpscares, which is fair… but they’re very good jumpscares. In the end, The Witch’s House presents a perfect short horror story with excellent pacing that continually surprises the player and doesn’t overstay its welcome. The puzzles are clever without being overly difficult, the 16-bit graphics are beautiful, and the translation is excellent.