All aboard Parascientific Escape: Cruise in the Distant Seas, a mystery point & click visual novel with puzzle elements. You take on the role of Hitomi Akaneno, a not so ordinary psychic as she can use 2 powers, clairvoyance & telekinesis. Set on a luxury cruise ship owned by a multibillionaire company in which Hitomi has been invited by an anonymous person which claims to have information regarding her father & sister. Soon after arriving at the meeting point an explosion occurs leaving you trapped in a room. During this point, the game will teach you a bit about how the things work plus provide the 1st major plot point involving something even more than Hitomi.
Gameplay sections consist of an exploration phase in which you will go about the typical point & click things such as solving minor environmental/fetch quest puzzles & movement from one area to the next. Others puzzles involve minor deduction & slide puzzles involving the usage of the psychic powers. All slide puzzles, which are sadly the majority of puzzles, are solved using the combination of Telekinesis & Clairvoyance, both of which run on an allowance system, meaning you have a limited amount of moves in which to solve them though there is no other penalty outside of having to restart the Telekinesis portion.
Outside of this Exploration sections, you will be able to take a breather with some reading & talking to other characters which reveals more of the story, though I did not find it particularly deep. Music is ok at best, its major flaw being only having about 5 or so tracks which means you will be hearing the same song all throughout, namely some pop sounding one which played during some dramatic moments. Art was serviceable, though I found skin tones too bright to look at points compared to the background which I found distracting. There were some typos here & there as well but not enough to be annoying or confusing when performing tasks.
All in all, Parascientific Escape is a very light & short title that ranges from around 4-5 hours. It is a puzzle game, where the puzzles are often repeated & gives you no fear of failure at all. Some music might be grating to certain people. The characters don’t stand out all that well & its story won’t win any prizes. At its price of around 5$US for a 4-5 hour mediocre game, some might find it a turn-off. I honestly found it passable, there are definitely worse games to spend that money on but as are there better ones. It is worth a look at if you find nothing better on the eShop. It has a sequel out in NA at the time of this writing, with a 3rd one announced in Japan so it touched on enough right notes to garner some interest.
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