The Paranormasight games exist thanks to high-profile indies, Square Enix says

The deluge of video game releases — nearly 20,000 games launched on Steam in 2025 alone — is one of the most challenging obstacles for indies, as the chances of getting discovered grow increasingly smaller. But for Square Enix's Paranormasight series, the opposite is true. Square Enix hasn't released sales numbers for The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, but it was successful enough for the publisher to greenlight The Mermaid's Curse. The sequel's existence is noteworthy, as Square Enix pledged in its 2024 annual report to focus primarily on "quality over quantity" after that year's slate of remakes and spinoffs performed poorly.

Takanari Ishiyama, writer and director of The Seven Mysteries of Honjo and The Mermaid's Curse, says the rise of high-quality games from indie developers is encouraging people to check out smaller-scale games, like his.

"High-quality indie games have started to stand out, bringing greater attention to smaller-scale titles as well," Ishiyama told Polygon in an email interview. "The Paranormasight series doesn’t aim to do anything new or groundbreaking; rather, it focuses on carefully crafting traditional games and ensuring they’re genuinely entertaining, and I believe we’ve been able to successfully convey that appeal."

Image: Square Enix

The Mermaid's Curse follows several main characters on Kameshima Island, a real place, despite the game suggesting everything in its story is fictional. The island is under threat of a cataclysmic flood, which coincides with the appearance of mermaids and rumors of a way to obtain immortality — if you're willing to pay the price. There's murder and missing persons, tragic tales of love and loss, and an inventive knack for blending the past and present.

Despite the unusual narrative elements, it certainly qualifies as a traditional game. Other narrative-driven games such as Scarlet Hollow aim to revolutionize relationships, while Old Skies and The Seance of Blake Manor add unique gimmicks to their storytelling. But Mermaid's Curse is closer to something like Nintendo's Famicom Detective Club games. You explore different locations, talk to people to gather information, and solve a few logic (and physical) puzzles. That's about it as far as interactivity goes.

So Ishiyama relies on storytelling and unique perspectives to make Paranormasight stand out. It's literal in some cases, like making the protagonists' point of view unusual. Honjo's main characters are culpable of terrible crimes, and Mermaid's Curse's heroes include a canny housewife-detective and the child of a woman shunned as an outsider by their small island community. But Ishiyama also looks to the past for ways to add unexpected angles to his stories. Honjo eventually becomes a tale about one person's cruelty echoing through the ages, and its success encouraged Ishiyama to dig deeper into his own interests for Mermaid's Curse: the mists of the far past.

"I wasn’t particularly interested in history during my student days," he said. "However, since I began creating my own works, I’ve developed a perspective that considers how certain events can be presented in an engaging way against the historical backdrop. From a creative standpoint, I’m especially drawn to the ancient past, stories set thousands of years ago, where I find a strong sense of mystery and adventure."

Image: Square Enix

The foundation of Mermaid's Curse is about 1,000 years old, a blend of historical fact — the exploits of the Taira clan during the politically tumultuous Heian period — with supernatural fiction. The clan's deeds intertwined with curse stones, mysterious objects that amplify negative intent and events — and often cause horrible catastrophes. It sounds farfetched, but, as Mermaid's Curse notes in its in-game encyclopedia, the stories are in the same vein as actual folklore and legends told in the region about the Taira clan.

"I think the appeal of basing stories on actual surviving folklore is that it enhances realism and makes the narrative more believable," Ishiyama says. "When players think, 'Maybe something like this really could have happened,' it’s a sign that they’re truly immersed in the world and fully engaged with the story."

Ishiyama also looked for ways to subvert people's expectations of a mermaid story. He says mermaids and immortality are popular in Japanese occult fiction — and in pop culture too, with variations of the themes in works such as Ponyo, One Piece, and Fate/Grand Order — so he looked to folklore and less Western interpretations. Some he took straight from history, including the Heian-period story of a mermaid with a human head and fish body dragged from the sea in a net, which Mermaid's Curse mirrors in its opening act. Other inspiration came from Rumiko Takahashi's Mermaid Saga, a dark manga series about a man turned immortal after eating mermaid flesh, who now wants nothing more than to die in peace. Ishiayara also pointed to Tezuka Osamu’s Phoenix: Strange Beings, another tale of immortal beings grappling with the weight of their unending lives, as a key influence.

"From the outset, I was thinking about how we could set ourselves apart," he says. "We set out to create an atmosphere completely different from The Seven Mysteries of Honjo to showcase the breadth [and potential] of the Paranormasight series. I feel we were able to achieve this to a certain extent, though whether it delivers the experience people were hoping for is something I’d like to leave to everyone’s judgment."