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March 28, 2024, 06:33:12 PM

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Paradise Killer - solve murder of mass-murdering wankers

Started by Zetetic, March 20, 2022, 08:14:36 PM

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Zetetic

Paradise Killer is currently free on Xbox PC Game Pass and discounted to less than £10 on Steam until Tuesday 22nd (and has just received a bit of an update).

It looks like this quite a lot:


It sounds like this quite a lot.

It's a walking-around exploring and being-a-detective game. Both are pretty good. I loved the 20 hours I spent with it back in September 2020.

I've no particular love for vapourwave or city-pop or the like (although maybe I should admit Snow White makes my heart hurt, and perhaps there's a link there) but I found that the aesthetic was both meaningful and functional.

On the one hand, it the game's world to ours in a particular way that allowed the cosmic horror to act as a mirror without reducing me to tears (and I was quite easy to reduce to tears towards the end of 2020).

On the other hand it's probably integral to how they could build this sort of a game - with its emphasis on exploration of a large varied space - with such a small team and such a small budget; an aesthetic built around the recontexualisation of the kitsch is one of the few approaches that actually lets you just rework and reuse store-built assets with something feeling wrong or half-baked.

It does something very fun in the first few minutes - I think it's worth playing those few minutes for that alone.

Wonder if anyone else played, wonder if anyone else liked it, wonder if anyone can recommend anything that felt like it to play.

If you do play it:
- Always use the footbaths.
- Use fast travel if you like.


madhair60

Extremely good game. I have not finished it yet. Yes, use the foot baths, they transform the way you get around.

This game is wonderfully open-ended. Sorry, I can't think of anything much to say about it besides "it good". Er, it may put some people off with how heavily stylised it is at first, but it's worth persevering.

ProvanFan

I liked it a lot. This might seem a strange comparison, but the non-linear investigating reminded me a bit of Outer Wilds. And Return of the Obra Dinn. While the look of it reminded me of the Dreamcast.

ProvanFan

Oh aye, it also pulls one of my fave stunts at the end by giving us

Spoiler alert
a vocal version of the main theme!
[close]

Well I say fave but can't think of another example. NiGHTS?

Zetetic

Quote from: ProvanFan on March 21, 2022, 01:03:55 AMThis might seem a strange comparison, but the non-linear investigating reminded me a bit of Outer Wilds.
Think that link makes a lot of sense (and reminds me that I need to return to Echoes of the Eye).

brat-sampson

#5
Yeah, this is really well put-together. Everything's mad, which means it all kinda just makes sense if you go with the flow. It's amazing how quickly talk of ritual sacrifice, demonic possession, the resurrection of dead alien Gods etc can form an identical story flow to a well-written whodunnit. The locations are usually great, though I could have done with like 20% fewer item drops around the living quarters. Having 20-odd buildings with multiple accessible floors and pickups throughout but relatively little meaningful content was probably more than they needed. It's a good excuse to just listen to the music and do some farming, I guess.

I haven't quite finished it but I have fully finished investigating. I had to look up one final thing online, a location I missed first time around and would have hated trying to track down without hints at that point. Having said that I thought the in-game clues for tracking down other certain locations were really well-framed.

I'm going to read over all my info again one more time then I'm looking forward to starting the trial.

brat-sampson

Done the trial. Definitely nailed the right main guilty party/parties*, but there may have been some collateral damage...

Side note, did anyone else know you can Sprint with L1/Lb? Learned that getting the last collectable I needed for all achievements. I am very smart.

*Keeping it vague, who knows!

Zetetic

Quote from: ProvanFan on March 21, 2022, 01:03:55 AMbut the non-linear investigating reminded me a bit of Outer Wilds.
One thing this link made me think about is the way that they share a moment almost right at the start that feels essentially the same - when you first break atmosphere in The Outer Wilds and when you step out of Lady Love-Dies' prison/penthouse in Paradise Killer - but with different twists and with different atmospheres.

In both cases, the games are giving you sense of the scale and possibilities of the world and the task ahead of you - big, but somehow manageably so - but it's played more for awe in The Outer Wilds and more for alien coolness in Paradise Killer.

Spoiler alert
The repetition of the moment in The Outer Wilds and the subsequent maybe more awesome revelation of the supernova ends up making them very different, I guess.)
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