Parascientific Escape: Crossing at the Farthest Horizon

Genre: Visual Novel / Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Parascientific Escape: Crossing at the Farthest Horizon, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2017, is a game with Visual Novel and Graphic Adventure elements. This is the third and as of this writing final game in The Parascientific Escape trilogy, with this game having players reprise the roles of both psychic protagonists of the prior two games.

Hitomi from the first game has gone to work for the psychic research organization, ZENA, but suddenly gets another anonymous invitation claiming to be from the “Ghost” who set events from the first game into motion, prompting her to follow that invitation to the fictional country of Witsarock. Meanwhile, private investigator Kyosuke from the second game, now engaged to his sixteen year-old assistant (ew, yuck) is hot on the trail of Ritsu, who seems intent on reigniting war in Witsarock, and comes to discover that the man he intended to ask for help in his search has been murdered. Players will alternate between the two characters’ stories, which will of course eventually cross paths.

Fans of this series will likely appreciate how Crossing at the Farthest Horizon brings together characters and story elements from both prior games, ideally bringing together the best elements of both games. However, players who missed one or both earlier games will be left in the dark, as this game is constantly bringing up events and characters from earlier games in the series, resulting in this being the one game in the series that just won’t work for newcomers to the series, it’s pretty much for fans only. However, there’s another flaw in the storytelling here – the game’s English is pretty spotty, and while earlier games definitely had some issues with this, Crossing at the Farthest Horizon fares worse than the prior two games in this regard.

As with the presentation, the game’s music and visuals are in line with those in the previous game, using anime-style character portraits in front of reasonably-detailed 2D backgrounds, backed by fittingly tense music that works well enough for the game’s serious tone.

And as with the prior games in the series, the gameplay in this game is split between Visual Novel-style sections with a lot of talking and Graphic Adventure sections where you’ll be investigating the environment, grabbing useful items, and using those items to solve puzzles and get past obstacles. These puzzles seem fairly sensible in their design, and they’re made somewhat more interesting by the occasional use of the characters’ respective psychic powers – depending on the character, you could be using the first game’s clairvoyance and telekinesis (welllllll… not so much, unfortunately), or the second game’s “chronokinesis”. It’s nice that this game does at least in theory try to mesh together the elements of both the earlier games, though it definitely seems like the second game’s mechanics take the forefront here.

In the end, Parascientific Escape: Crossing at the Farthest Horizon is a game that will likely please fans of this series, but probably won’t appeal to anyone else. Those who played the prior two games will likely be thrilled to see the characters from those games come together in their investigations, but everyone else will likely be left scratching their heads. And while the Visual Novel and Graphic Adventure elements are overall probably at their best here, there’s still nothing truly extraordinary to propel this game past countless others in the genre.

tl;dr – Parascientific Escape: Crossing at the Farthest Horizon is a game with Visual Novel and Graphic Adventure elements that brings back the two psychic-powered characters from the prior two games in a story that ties their tales together. Due to all the references to characters and events from the prior two games, this is really only a game that I can recommend to those who played through those earlier games in the series, and even then this game doesn’t offer anything especially new or compelling beyond what we saw in those games.

Grade: C

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