In 2016, a film crew entered a forbidden part of Hong Kong's infamous Kowloon Walled City - at night.
- The world is divided into Yin and Yang.
Everything has a soul, including stones as well.
Yin and Yang are different spaces, although the split line might not be very clear.
The intrusiveness between space is forbidden to do so.
If one breaks the order of Yin and Yang, terrible consequences would be made.
After dawn, the Hong Kong underworld comes to life.
Paranormal HK is first person horror game developed by Hong Kong-based indie company Ghostpie Studios. As the title states, the game is based on the Urban Legends of Hong Kong's hidden, supernatural world, in which you're tasked with exploring.
As the cameraman of a journalist crew hosting a supernatural-themed online channel titled "Beyond the Invisible", after requests from your producers and promises of an expensive contract, your crew decide to begin filming their latest documentary in Kowloon Walled City after nightfall, in the middle of the Hungry Ghost Festival. Expectedly, spooky things start to happen almost immediately when you're filming Kathy, the crew's main star, and you're inevitably separated from your team. And then you discover the supposedly-abandoned, deserted world of Kowloon at night is filled with assorted paranormal activity.
Today is July 14th. The day the Gates of Hell opens up. You shouldn't have been here...
- Always Night: The game is set at night in Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City, where you'll need to survive the assorted supernatuural going-ons.
- Blackout Basement: Levels where you're crossing dark alleyways, with only a circle of light from a torchlight as illumination.
- Black Eyes of Evil: Visible on all the ghost enemies, but especially notable on the ghost-woman behind a door when the cutscene does a close-up.
- Featureless Protagonist: Subverted, your gender isn't made explicitly clear, but you can collect your ID lost card in the first stage. Turns out you're a dude name Chow Wei-Lok, and that your friends calls you Lok (not that it's relevant in-game).
- Gainax Ending: You escape Kowloon Walled City in a talisman-covered automobile, fleeing from a haunted parking lot and made your way to an exit... only for the game to dump you into a White Void Room where you meet the same, mysterious old lady who helped you retrieve Kathy in the first place. Then you pass out and awake in a studio filled with cameras, before inexplicably ending up in your apartment, except it's now filled with televisions and the only exit is blocked by yet another unnamed, spooky ghost girl. Who then leaves you as you start screaming at the top of your voice as the credits roll. Mind Screw isn't even scratching the tip of the insanity iceberg...
- Ghostly Death Reveal: After your early separation with the channel's main star, Kathy, shortly afterwards you run into a spooky ghost girl wearing Kathy's blue dress, and having exactly the same hairstyle as hers. Though things are not what they seemed...
- Ghost Song: You can come across an empty Opera stage which suddenly lights up when you enter, and on it is the soul of an ex-opera singer who begins singing a mournful, tearful Chinese melody. Approach the stage up close though and she dissappears.
- Implacable Man: The animated spider-mannequin wil relentlessly chase you through the alleyways and into an abandoned opera house, and no attempts to stop her works.
- Intrepid Reporter: You're part of a film crew who decides to go for the big scoop, despite rumours of supernatural occurences happening in Kowloon after dark, even infiltrating in forbidden alleyways and restricted areas walled off by the local council. And then things go wrong.
- Jump Scare: Ghosts and spirits tend to hide behind doors
and suddenly reveal to you in this manner. The background even went from silent to a sudden, high-pitched musical note to startle you. - Killed Offscreen: Most of your fellow crew-mates after you lose them in the opening cutscene, and you can only find their bloodied corpses in the aftermath.
- More Teeth than the Osmond Family: The ghosts of Kowloon tends to be rather... toothy. Especially evident on the first one when you open a door and is treated to a cutscene of you seeing her toothy, fang-loaded mug cracking a grin on you.
- Murderous Mannequin: The sentient, eight-limbed mannequin demon called a "spider-mannequin" who haunts a department store will come after you the moment you disturb it. The spider-mannequin can kill you on contact and you spend a level hiding underneath tables in a dimly-lit room, trying to sneak your way out without getting caught.
- Paper Talisman: Taoist paper talismans, obtained in the first act, are necessary items to exorcise the spirits posessing Kathy to retrieve her. Near the end of the game after you made a second visit to Kowloon, you can obtain a second stash of charms - in the climax, you escape Kowloon by pasting a number of those charms on a car's hood and driving your way out of a ghost-infested basement, where upon contact with the charms ghosts simply Disappears into Light.
- Run or Die: You're absolutely unable to find any means of defending yourself from the supernatural forces, and will need to spend the whole game fleeing from danger until the sun rises. Expect this warning to pop up every now and then during the game.Run! Don't get caught!
- Spooky Photographs: While trying to find your way out of Kowloon Walled City, sometimes you can come across identification tags belonging to your fellow crew members... with their faces contorted. You'll just respond with a "nope" and put them back where you found them.
- Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: One of the ghosts you encountered is the stereotypical Asian ghost-girl, clad in a white dress with long hair that obscures most of her face.
- Time Skip: There's one shortly after the first level, where you managed to retrieve Kathy and escape Kowloon. Cue a Title Card narrating that Kathy eventually regains consciousness but forgot her experiences in Kowloon, and started behaving strangely after the incident. Nevertheless, you start a relationship with her only for you to lose contact with Kathy after 3 months, before a message from Kathy summons you back to Kowloon.
