parascientific escape Archives

Celebrating All Things Mysterious: Parascientific Escape: Crossing at the Farthest Horizon

May 122023

After talking about Cruise in the Distant Seas on Monday and Gear Detective on Wednesday, it’s now time to conclude our look at the Parascientific Escape trilogy with the final entry.

While the first two games were largely separate despite a few connections, Parascientific Escape: Crossing at the Farthest Horizon brings them together and serves a sequel to both.

Hitomi travels to the country of Witsarock in response to a letter from “the Ghost,” while Kyosuke visits Witsarock to meet a man who has information for him, only to find he’s been murdered.

The story alternates between the two characters, as well as other characters, in order to tell a bigger story than that of its predecessors. With both protagonists coming together and the antagonist’s plot being brought into the light at last, it has the potential to be the best in the series.

Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Crossing at the Farthest Horizon plays nearly identically to Gear Detective. With both Hitomi and Kyosuke as protagonists, I’d hoped both their psychic powers would come into play (perhaps even others, when I saw other characters getting viewpoint sections), but the handful of escape room sections only let you play as Kyosuke.

Some of the puzzles feel less intuitive, and the hint system isn’t as helpful as in Gear Detective. Worse, at one point the memo used to record puzzle details simply left off the final line of a puzzle by mistake, which had me stuck for quite a while.

It also has far more typos than either of the previous two games, not enough to be a big problem, but enough to be noticeable.

Playing this third game also made me understand why I criticize these stories’ idealistic approaches to their problems. After all, I normally eat up stories about redemption and the power of friendship. In the Parascientific Escape series, however, developments occur so quickly that it doesn’t feel natural. It’s hard to buy a character desperate to save a murderer she considers a friend when they’ve only known each other for a few hours. It’s difficult to be emotionally invested in a villain’s redemption when you’ve only seen them on-screen a handful of times.

Click for Parascientific Escape spoilers

This goes double for anything involving romance. How did Yukiya end up interested in Ritsu? I know they met briefly in Gear Detective, but Crossing at the Farthest Horizon has him wanting to ask her out, and it felt like it came out of nowhere.

Unrelated to that, Iori also felt like an unnecessary addition, when keeping Ritsu as the main antagonist could have allowed her to be more fleshed out.

Parascientific Escape: Crossing at the Farthest Horizon has some exciting moments and some interesting puzzles, and it’s nice to see the first two games’ stories brought to a resolution. If you were hoping for it to build upon its predecessors and be the best of the three, however, you might be disappointed.

The mystery unfortunately takes a backseat once again, as well. We’ve now covered all three entries as part of our mystery game celebration, but the second is the only one I’d really call a mystery.

But don’t worry! We’re not even halfway through the month yet, so stay tuned for next week as we discuss even more mystery games!

Celebrating All Things Mysterious: Parascientific Escape: Gear Detective – Solving Murders With Mild Time Travel

May Mystery Game Madness 7 Responses » Tagged with: adventure game, parascientific escape, visual novel

May 102023

On Monday, we discussed Parascientific Escape: Cruise in the Distant Seas, and now it’s time to talk about the second game in the trilogy.

Parascientific Escape: Gear Detective is set in the same universe as the first game, but with a new cast of characters. You play a detective named Kyosuke, who is an artificial psychic due to a specially-designed prosthetic arm and eye.

Along with his assistant, he begins investigating a recent serial killing case, using his psychic powers to help.

His ability is “chronokinesis,” which allows him to look up to 5 days into the past and manipulate objects within that time frame. This gives you a limited degree of time travel to use when solving puzzles. For example, if you need to open a locked drawer and have a memo telling you what time the drawer was last open, you can look back at that time when the key is in view and hide it so that it can’t be taken away. More commonly, you can look into the past to see passwords, clues about codes, etc.

While it uses largely the same gameplay systems as its predecessor for the escape room sections (minus the sliding block puzzles), everything is slightly more streamlined. In a peculiar design decision, you can set the difficulty to easy if you want the game to automatically give you the dialogue for tapping on an object when there’s only one option. Why there’s a “difficulty” setting solely to select whether or not you need to manually tap “look” or not, I don’t know.

Now, Gear Detective is much more of a visual novel than its predecessor was. While the first game felt like a series of escape rooms broken up by visual novel storytelling, Gear Detective is the reverse, a visual novel with occasional escape room situations.

In fact, instead of the visual novel sections just providing story beats between puzzles, now there are entire segments where the gameplay is simply visiting different locations to get new dialogue and try different actions through the visual novel interface. It’s never challenging, since at worst you’ll just visit each location until you find one with a new option, but it allows for more optional conversations if you want to take the time for them.

The narrative sections also include dialogue options, as well. These options might look like they’re just for flavor, but there are actually multiple endings this time around.

Once you’ve completed the game, you can see whether your progress in each chapter is marked with a gold star, a pink star, or nothing at all. The result you’ve gotten the majority of determines your ending. You can then replay chapters with the option to skip the “adventure” (visual novel) parts or “investigation” (escape room) parts. Not needing to replay the investigations makes it easy to go back through for the other endings, although the need to repeatedly move between locations to perform different actions starts to feel tedious when you’re doing that.

The story is fine, less humorous than the first game’s yet with a more clearly defined narrative. It still had that odd mix of dark topics and power-of-friendship idealism, but the connections back to the first game left me intrigued about how it will all come together.

Parascientific Escape: Gear Detective might lack the aspects that made Cruise in the Distant Seas unique and feel more like a traditional visual novel / adventure game instead, but it’s a stronger game overall. Will the third game surpass it? Stay tuned, as we’ll conclude our look at this trilogy on Friday!

Celebrating All Things Mysterious: Parascientific Escape: Cruise in the Distant Seas – Escape Rooms and Psychic Powers

May Mystery Game Madness, Reviews, Video games 10 Responses » Tagged with: adventure game, parascientific escape, visual novel

May 082023

During the final days of the 3DS eShop back in March, you might recall me mentioning the Parascientific Escape series as being among my final purchases.

Parascientific Escape is a trilogy of short adventure games released exclusively for the 3DS. Since they appeared to be mysteries, what better time to try them out than during our mystery game month?

Parascientific Escape: Cruise in the Distant Seas is the first game in the series. Set in a world where psychic powers have begun to rise to prominence, you play a young woman named Hitomi who is rare for being the only known double psychic – someone with two psychic powers.

After receiving an anonymous letter asking her to meet with someone on a cruise ship, she boards the ship and goes to the meeting place at the appointed time. However, once she arrives at the room where the letter told her to go, an explosion rocks the ship and the passengers are told to evacuate, while Hitomi finds herself locked in the room. Her situation then takes a turn for the worse when she meets a girl with a bomb strapped to her neck and instructions saying she must find three keycards hidden around the ship in order to deactivate the bomb.

The story is told through visual novel sequences, while the adventure game segments play out like a series of escape rooms. You use the touch screen to examine items in the environment and use items you find in order to solve puzzles.

It can be a little tedious at times. For example, to open a drawer, you’d likely need to tap the drawer, select “look,” read dialogue about the drawer, tap the drawer again, and then select the new option “open.” Fortunately, the array of options is limited enough that it doesn’t get too annoying.

As is common for these kinds of escape room sequences, you’ll need to solve puzzles to proceed, some a simple matter of using the correct item in the correct spot, others with more of a riddle-like approach. But there’s a third type of puzzle that helps this game stand out a bit from the genre, thanks to Hitomi’s powers.

Hitomi’s psychic powers allow her to see through objects and manipulate objects with telekinesis, which comes into play with the puzzles. For example, one puzzle has you look inside a locked drawer and see that there is a hole in the base of the drawer. You then use telekinesis to move the item you need until it falls through the hole. Each puzzle gives you a limited number of times you can use each psychic power, so you need to plan your moves carefully. They’re essentially sliding block puzzles, but they make for a nice change of pace.

Meanwhile, the story is… fine. It has some funny moments, as well as dramatic ones (although the music doesn’t always match the scene, such as upbeat music continuing to play in the background during the bomb revelation), and the overall premise is intriguing. Its tone feels a bit off at times, though, approaching dark concepts through an idealistic perspective where friendship always triumphs.

It’s also not as much of a mystery game as I expected, although trying to learn the antagonist’s identity and motivations are an important part of the plot. It feels like more of a thriller. I suppose it’s as much of a mystery as Zero Escape is, albeit on a smaller scale.

But the characters are likeable enough, with some pretty funny interactions, so that kept me going.

Anyway, Parascientific Escape: Cruise in the Distant Seas is an enjoyable enough game if you like the idea of an escape room style adventure game with psychic powers adding a bit of a twist. Until I played it, I’d thought the Parascientific Escape games were all entirely separate, but Cruise in the Distant Seas leaves loose ends to be resolved in a sequel. Stay tuned, because we’ll be talking about the second game in the trilogy next!