Parascientific Escape: Gear Detective

Genre: Visual Novel / Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Parascientific Escape: Gear Detective, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2017, is a game with Visual Novel and Graphic Adventure elements. This is the second game in The Parascientific Escape trilogy, with this game having players take the role of Kyosuke Ayana, a private detective with a prosthetic arm and prosthetic eye that give him psychic abilities. One day, Kyosuke is hired by a client concerned that she may be the next target of a serial killer, while at the same time he’s enlisted by a friend to track down and capture that same serial killer.

This game’s story and tone are thankfully much more reined in and somewhat grounded compared to the first game in the series, though of course the strong role psychic powers play in the story and gameplay definitely keeps things from becoming mundane. I should also note that this game’s story clearly takes place in the same world as the first game, but its focus on a different cast of characters means that players needn’t have played the first game to understand what’s going on here. While I’m overall pleased with the story, I do have one caveat – Kyosuke is joined by his assistant, a high school girl who insists that the two of them are a couple. Given her age, this makes these moments… well, extremely uncomfortable…

As with the story, the game’s soundtrack is likewise much more befitting the tone of the game, with background music highlighting the mysterious nature of the killer being tracked down. Meanwhile, the game’s visuals are in line with those in the first game, using anime-style character portraits in front of reasonably-detailed 2D backgrounds.

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 Kyosuke’s psychic power, “chronokinesis”, which is another way of saying that you can pick a time over the prior five days and see how the scene looked at that time. Personally, I felt that this ability was somewhat less interesting than the prior game’s unique abilities, but it still adds something unique to this game all the same.

Overall, I feel like Parascientific Escape: Gear Detective is a good improvement over the first game in the series, with a more sensible, grounded tone. However, overall this game didn’t do too much to pull me in. The “chronokinesis” is a decent idea, but not quite as interesting as the prior game’s ability, and overall this is a game that fans of Visual Novels and Graphic Adventures may enjoy, but it’s not one that I would say is in any way essential.

tl;dr – Parascientific Escape: Gear Detective is a game with Visual Novel and Graphic Adventure elements that puts players in the role of a psychic detective trying to track down a serial killer. The way this game uses these psychic abilities in its Graphic Adventure sections is novel and interesting, and this game is an improvement over its more tone-deaf predecessor, but it ultimately doesn’t do enough to truly stand out within the genre. If you’re a fan of Graphic Adventure and Visual Novel games, this may interest you, but most are probably better off skipping it.

Grade: C+

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