Paranormasight’s Director Talks About The Series’ Successes, Meta Puzzles, And The State Of Adventure Games

2023’s Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo was an interesting surprise from Square Enix: a horror title taking cues from classics like The Portopia Serial Murders Case for a new adventure experience. It found its audience, though, and this year the Paranormasight team released its sophomore effort, The Mermaid’s Curse.

With two games out and a tease of the possibility of more Paranormasight in the future, we talked with director Takanari Ishiyama over email about the making of these games, the craft behind them, and even some spoiler-filled behind-the-scenes details on some of The Mermaid’s Curse best moments.

This interview has been re-ordered, in order to put the spoiler content at the bottom.

What was the original pitch for the first Paranormasight? Were there any main themes or drives you wanted to incorporate from the very beginning?

Takanari Ishiyama (TI): When we started planning the first installment of PARANORMASIGHT, the very first decision we made was to make it a mystery adventure game. At the time, our mission was to create an entirely new IP, but our budget was extremely limited, so we couldn’t afford to experiment with unproven gameplay ideas or entirely new forms of expression, nor did we have time to explore them from scratch. Given those constraints, we considered how we could succeed using only the resources already available to us, and concluded that by making it an adventure game, a genre we had prior production experience with and the necessary know-how for, we could confidently meet both the deadline and the expected level of quality. We also chose the mystery genre because it’s one of my strengths, and I felt confident it would allow me to make the game genuinely engaging. As for why the first installment leaned more into horror, that was the producer’s intention, as it would make the game more appealing for streaming.