Seven Mysteries is a Vietnamese freeware horror puzzle game made by sanggameboy in RPG Maker VX Ace. Late at night, several students in a cursed school encounter a string of supernatural events. One student, Tuan, goes on a supposedly fun treasure hunt, only to discover a notebook, which holds a dangerous secret. It involves mysterious accidents, disappearances, and murders involving transferred students over the course of a year, apparently because of a certain curse. What is it and how does it connect to the "curse" on the school?
There are 5 different endings for you to explore: the True Ending, Happy Ending and 3 Bad Endings. Different requirements have to be met and actions taken to achieve all of the endings. It is difficult to mention tropes without spoiling the twist in the True Ending, so be warned before reading beyond this point.
There's an official 2017 remake of the game, called "Seven Mysteries: The Last Page". The characters are more fleshed out and its given a better explanation about the school and the curse.
Seven Mysteries provides examples of:
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: Each chapter of the game focuses on a different lead character, though Tuan is stated to be the main protagonist.
- The Bad Guy Wins: In most of the endings, Sang and the Headmaster get away with their killings.
- Big Bad: The Headmaster is the one behind the mysterious deaths, as he blackmailed Sang and Linh into killing anyone who got too close to the hauntings of the school- though Sang himself is behind the curse as he killed the first few students and framed Thuy, resulting in her angry ghost cursing the school.
- Brainwashed and Crazy: The curse causes this in whomever it possesses, either driving the host completely insane, augmenting the darker emotions they keep inside, or controlling their actions to some degree without actually taking their sanity. For some reason, Tuan is immune to it.
- Deconstruction: The series is a deconstruction of the school horror stories.
- Eye Scream: This game is fond of it. Linh lost an eye after someone threw a rock on his face. Tuan has visions of how Linh lost his eye and during half of the game, Linh’s pain is inflicted to him and becomes temporally blind. And, in the Happy End, Tuan kills Sang by stabbing his eyes until there are only two bleeding sockets left.
- Foreshadowing: When Tuan reads the list of transferred students, it's shown that most of the characters at the beginning of the story were part of them. But Sang's name is absent, despite being one of the characters at the beginning of the story.
- Golden Ending: The Happy Ending has Tuan stabbing and killing Sang with the pen, lifting the curse on the school, getting the Headmaster arrested, and getting the school closed down for good. Considering the True End has Tuan Wrongfully Committed, this is the best ending of the game.
- Mood Whiplash: What seems like a typical Japanese school supernatural story turns into horror with realistic consequences.
- Multiple Endings:
- Bad End 1: After using the first-aid kit and surviving the night, Tuan decides to transfer schools and start a new life away from the curse. While he is waiting for the Principal to get his report, he accidentally finds Linh's diary and realizes that Sang's the murderer. When Tuan tries to make a run for it, Sang enters and stabs him to death. He takes his corpse to the secret room where all the other bodies are, rotting away. It's also revealed that the Headmaster is in on it and praises Sang for his work.
- Bad End 2: After deciding not to use the first-aid kit and surviving the night, the next day, Tuan tells Sang that he has found a way to break the curse. Sang leads him to a mirror-filled room and shoves him inside.
- Bad End 3: If the player has the two secret papers then goes to the Bad End 2 path. While locked up in the room, Tuan finds the truth why the Headmaster is working with Sang and reveal a string of murders that have happened in the past, starting with Thuy, revealed to be a Red Herring. Tuan knocks out Sang and escapes to the library. Not long after, Sang will burst through the door and stab Tuan repeatedly and mockingly state that he failed. The next year, there is a new batch of students ready to start their school year. Ah, and Sang gets away with his actions and we can only assume he will continue killing more curious students...
- Happy End: After being locked up by Sang, Tuan escapes and picks up the pen that he aparentally dropped. Sang will burst through the room with a knife and prepares to kill Tuan. Tuan uses his pen to kill Sang and goes back to the library to await midnight, where he succumbs to the curse. The school is then be shut down, the headmaster will be arrested for his crimes as Linh looks over the closed school before walking away.
- True End: Instead of using the pen, Tuan stabs Sang with a knife. Unfortunately, the Principal decides to use Tuan as a scapegoat and blames him for all the murders. Tuan is placed in an insane asylum, where he continues to have hallucinations. Ah, and Sang survives his wound, waking up at the hospital. The Stinger reveals that Sang disposed his partner Linh and has his corpse in an isolated well in the school backyard...Though it's unknown if Thuy's spirit killed him in revenge for provoking her death or if Sang has gone off the deep end.
- Red Herring: A major part. After Spoiled Sweet Thuy was transferred into the school, mysterious accidents, disappearances, and murders started occurring, so Linh concludes that Thuy is a killer and convinces his best friend Sang to murder her. In order to avoid the school being closed, the Headmaster motivated him and Sang to be "secret-keepers" and murdering every student that got too close to the truth. Eventually he got fed up with it and transferred schools.
- The Reveal: Sang is a sociopathic killer that had killed seven classmates over a two-week period, framing Thuy for his crimes. Thuy's angry ghost was haunting the school, tormenting people who wandered in at night with horrific hallucinations. The headmaster knew about the haunting, but to avoid shutting the school down he conspired with the murderer to kill off the victims/witnesses and stockpile the bodies in a hidden room.
- Twist Ending
- Wham Line: "This is how we keep the secrets...new one."
Seven Mysteries: The Last Page provides examples of:
- Adaptation Name Change: With the exception of Sang, everyone's names are changed from Asian names to Western names. Examples include:
- Tuan is called Nathan.
- Linh becomes Neal.
- My is called Keira.
- Loi is called David.
- Thuy becomes Ginny/Jinny.
- Arc Words: "Everything returns".
- Big Bad: The Demon is the one behind the curse and the mysterious deaths of students this time around. Sang and the Headmaster are his pawns in this version of the story, and Neal's goal is to save Sang from the demon.
- Chekhov's Gun: In Chapter 3, a letter that David picks up says “When that black cat appears... ...he will wake up... ...and then at this school... ...all will meet each other once more.” The player is likely to forget about this, but later on, a black cat does indeed appear and help the heroes to reunite with Sang at the school building.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: It took four years and a remake game, but in the end everyone gets to have a happy conclusion for the series.
- Irony: Sang made a deal with the demon because he's desperate not to be separated from Neal, only for the demon to possess Sang's body, murder people and distance from Neal even further.
- Green-Eyed Monster: A source of conflict in the game is the jealousy Sang feels regarding him and Neal getting separated into different classrooms. It makes his soul vulnerable enough for the demon to possess him.
- Have a Gay Old Time: Nathan, in the intro, expresses how "queer" it is to hear rumors of hauntings as soon as you transfer to a new town.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Averted. The remake clarifies that there is indeed a curse stemming from a demon feeding on negative emotions and despair.
- Multiple Endings: 4 side endings (based on the original game and Tuan's storyline), 2 main endings, and a secret ending.
- Main Ending 1: Unfortunately Neal is unable to save or reach Sang and he's fully possessed by the demon. Neal decides not to kill the possessed Sang and the demon mocks him for his naivety before leaving to cause havoc in the city. A few months later, the city has become an abandoned Ghost Town with Neal and Nathan being the only survivors. Neal leaves to search for Sang once again, leaving Nathan alone and resigned to his fate.
- Main Ending 2: Neal decides to kill the possessed Sang and they have a final reconciliation. With Sang gone, Nathan is forced to return to the insane asylum. Neal wishes to see Sang once again. Because he had outsmarted the demon, this causes a Time Skip a la Reset Button where Neal is transferred to the past, where he befriends Sang once again. It's implied that Neal will make things work out this time so that Sang wouldn't feel lonely anymore. Therefore, the demon wouldn't influence him anymore, the students who were murdered by Sang are still alive and Nathan will live as a normal student the next year.
- Secret Ending: If you have achieved the first two endings and go to Main Ending 1 with at least 9 scrolls, Nathan will find himself back in the Reset Button Ending of Main Ending 2, and will ask Neal and Sang what is happening. They realize that they are in a "Groundhog Day" Loop and work to prevent the deaths from happening, but everything seems to be going differently, as the incidents which cause the deaths do not happen at all. The demon, possessing Jinny, tells Nathan that there is only one way to escape the time loop. Nathan realizes he must go inside the tree from Main Ending 1 and disappear inside. He is last seen going through a door.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: After the timeskip, Nathan absolutely despises Sang and wants nothing to do with him or Neal's rescue operation. But he has no choice but to help him, after Neal freed him from the insane asylum.
- Reset Button Ending: In the True Ending, Inverted in this series, as compared to other Reset Button Endings, this undoes the existing Shoot the Shaggy Dog conclusion of the original game.
- You Have to Believe Me!: After Nathan was used as a scapegoat for the school murders, he acts so unhinged and loony while screaming about how Sang is the real murderer that it's no wonder no one believes him.
