Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse is a horror adventure, so I of course spent several hours diving for lobster instead

I can't stop diving in Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse, the new standalone entry in the horror-adventure visual novel franchise. There's ostensibly some kind of paranormal mystery playing out about mermaids and so on but I've not even really scratched the surface of that. There is one surface I've delved deep beyond, however: the surface of the water in the local bay.

Explaining exactly what's up in the Paranormasight games – both the original Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo and this new title, which was only revealed two weeks ago as existing at all – gives a bit too much away given the mystery of it all, but mechanically it's a nonlinear visual novel with some puzzle elements. You look around, investigate, talk to people, and generally move the plot forward and sometimes backwards.

Yes, backwards. As you play, "recollections" can trigger that can essentially jump backwards in a chain of events or to an entirely different perspective altogether to offer more context than you had before. This can be set before or after the current event you're experiencing, which opens up a lot of narrative doors while overall feverishly complicating attempts to talk about the plot of Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse in any sane way.

Deep dive

It helps that the game has an extremely detailed journal that chronicles everything from character profiles to locations to specific regional nuances and serves as a general extension of what you, the player, actually know at any given time. I'm not usually one to check the grimoires, as it were, but I've read everything Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse has had to throw at me – the mix of real, thoughtful consideration of physical places and events mixed with entirely fictional ones makes for fascinating reading.

But it's really not that big of a burden as of yet given that I have spent the vast majority of my time in Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse playing the diving minigame that's introduced in the opening moments. Narratively, you're a young man training to be a good ama diver, essentially a Japanese sea diver often associated with pearls but broadly someone that dives to fish for abalone and so on and so forth. So, naturally, there's a minigame where you hold your breath and swim about underwater to collect critters.

This has a series of skills associated with it like how long you can hold your breath, how fast you can swim, how hard it is to harvest your catch, and how far away you can identify your targets. The more goodies you bring back to the boat, the more experience you earn, and the more experience you earn, the more levels you get. Each level is another rank in one of those skills, which lets you do more of all of the above, and you get the idea.

At first, I was simply amused to find a whole progression system bolted onto this initial minigame. I did my dives, collected abalone and the like, and slowly gained experience. But as I got better and my skills improved, I could go further afield, collecting lobsters in trenches and collectible stickers. It got to the point where I figured, well, why not just max out all the skills and see what happens?

What happens is you max out your skills. You learn where all the best creatures hang out, the correct pathing to maximize your collection, and generally spend a lot of time in the digital sea. I also did my fair share of drowning, it should be said, with at least one instance being scripted and spooky while the rest simply happened because I got greedy and ran out of air.

It's not exactly engaging with Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse as intended, I suspect, but there's something to be said for a satisfying, simple feedback loop where numbers go up in a pretty game. And it is a pretty game with a distinct, almost painterly style. If the developers had simply made a diving game, I'd probably happily spend dozens of hours exploring the sea floor. As it is, I'm sure I'll get to the core mystery – something about mermaids, I think – at some point.

Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse is now available on PC, Nintendo Switch, and Mobile. If you're looking for something structurally similar, be sure to check out our ranking of the best visual novels.