Paradise Killer is a lot of things, and it does them all well. It’s an open world adventure game. It’s a murder mystery. And it’s a gonzo low fantasy story with a killer vaporwave soundtrack, two aesthetics that go together beautifully.
It is also a minor masterpiece.
Let’s dig in.
“There is no jury here.”
You are Lady Love Dies, an immortal investigator in exile. After three million days of isolation due to corruption from the god Damned Harmony, you are called back into action. The night before, the Council was murdered. Most of the inhabitants of Island 24 were gone or dead, so only a handful of suspects remain. Because you were exiled, you are the only person still on the island who is completely free from suspicion.
So you have been given free reign over a dead island. Question the island’s doctor, Doctor Doom Jazz, about the autopsy. What was the Architect, Carmelina Silence, doing the night of the murder? In an island of immortals who worship dread gods, everyone has secrets and motives. Your job is to ask questions, explore the grounds, and piece together the contradictory stories of the inhabitants.
Find out who killed the Council. Find out how. And then report back to the Judge for the trials, and see if you can prove your case.
“I must leave it to the impartial sword of justice within me to stab through the heart of the lies…”
This game contains some of the most flavorful writing and worldbuilding I’ve seen in ages. Initially, I was concerned that the aesthetic — the naming conventions, the design — would be a bit too twee. Instead, I ended up falling in love with the alternate history the game builds and the way learning that history informs your case. This is a game that pulls influences from cosmic horror and low fantasy, but creates something wholly its own. Like the gods of the game, its world is at once alien and uncomfortably familiar.
Essentially, there are vast cosmic gods roaming space. For millennia, those gods enslaved the human race. At some point, something the islanders called ‘the Great Betrayal’ occurred, and humanity killed or banished many of its former masters. Some humans remained loyal, however. Enter the Syndicate, a group of humans blessed with immortality, magical powers, and an unending quest to revive their dead and comatose gods. To that end, they have created the Islands. The islands are places for the Syndicate to kidnap mortals and force them into worship, hoping to revive their pantheon.
This backstory informs the setting in fresh and novel ways. This is a place that is recognizable — brutalist concrete structures and gargantuan bureaucracy of elites apathetic to the lives and suffering of its workers — but side by side with a fantastical, whimsical devotion to cosmic beings they don’t fully understand. Massive, ethereal statues populate the island, while vast pyramids line the horizon. The game recognizes how fucked up the Syndicate is, but it places obvious truths in the mouths of people you are primed to distrust. This is no Bioshock Infinite, arguing that fighting against slavery is just as bad as slavery itself. Instead, Paradise Killer‘s conversations paint complex but understandable characters with sympathetic motivations that may lead them to monstrous ends. And you, Lady Love Dies, are part of the problem, not the solution.
“…and let the blood of truth flow.”
Your core verbs, the things you do in the game, are talk and explore. I discussed above how I think the talking aspect works, but the exploration deserves note as well. In a way, Paradise Killer reminds me of a 21st century update to the old LucasArts point-and-click adventure games. You have puzzles, some of which are fairly arcane, and you have to put together clues gleaned from solving them.
Thankfully, as with 2019 masterpiece Outer Wilds, Paradise Killer solved an old adventure game bugbear. Namely, the solutions to puzzles in the genre can be… arcane, is maybe a polite way to put it. A less polite way is: Really fucking stupid. The puzzles in these games often depended on you ‘getting’ the headspace of the developer, which wasn’t always easy. Say ‘Rumplestiltskin’ to a King’s Quest fan. I dare you.
One smart choice these two games make is giving you a robust journal system. As you find clues, the game automatically links them to other relevant information in your journal. You may have discovered a random fact ten hours and five days previous that ties to a clue you just found. In older adventure games, well, good luck. In Paradise Killer, the game tracks those links and presents them to you in a clear, easy-to-read format.
And, again as with Outer Wilds, an open world really helps this kind of game. Because you have a large, mostly seamless setting to explore, there’s a genuine sense of discovery. Before even talking to many of the suspects, I explored a lot of the island. It gave me a better sense of the setting, which helped. But it also let me find clues and puzzles, so I could ask more in-depth questions when I did start seeking out the NPCs. And I can’t undersell how much of the game’s power comes from going somewhere you aren’t sure you should be and discovering something hidden while you’re there.
“Take us for a holiday to the land of truth!”
Brief digression: I love the character designs in this game. Hades had gorgeous characters, but one flaw: Where are the fat hotties? Come on, you’re really telling me that Dionysus, the most gluttonous god, is fucking shredded? Everyone in that game was the same kind of hot, the cut, MCU-lead type. For all the diversity in skin color, body size was pretty uniform.
That’s not necessarily bad, I guess. As I wrote about in my piece of Brittany Runs a Marathon, I often dread seeing fat people on screen. A lot of people don’t really understand what it’s like to live fat, and the media they make reflects that. And goes beyond it, unfortunately. Even many medical professionals aren’t really good at taking the issues of fat people seriously, blaming unrelated issues on weight. And do you know how rare it is to see a romance film or romantic comedy about overweight people?
All of which is to say, I really enjoyed that Lady Love Dies, the heroine, is on the zaftig side. She’s overweight. But she’s also got incredible style, from her outfit to the Veronica Lake swoop of her hair. And she’s an object of desire for men and women on the isle alike, as the game gives you optional romance subplots. It’s a small thing, but it was touching and thrilling for me, and it really highlighted the strength of the character design.
“Let us sip cocktails of facts on the beach of justice!”
In the end, I know I let some people get away with what they did. The game doesn’t know, can’t know, why I did it. Maybe I just never figured it out? In reality, I did figure it out. I had someone dead to rights. But… well, then I kept digging. They committed the crime, but I do not believe the person did so willingly. Part of the power of Paradise Killer is that it allowed me to have that emotional journey, and to make a choice. There was no comment about it, no recognition from the game or the character. But I felt that I got to know Lady Love Dies, and I felt like this was the choice she would have made.
Or… was it? The trials happen quickly, and while you do have agency in both the charges you bring and the evidence you choose to present, it is limited. And once you move on, the game gives you a final beat that… didn’t fit the person Lady Love Dies is, to me. Were the more sympathetic answers I had been giving people in conversations just me ‘playing’ the suspect — and myself? It felt weird, a moment of authorial conscription in a game defined by player agency.
Perhaps this just butts up against the limitations of a branching story. Or perhaps Kaizen Game Works were telling a different story than I thought they were. Your Lady Love Dies can talk a big game about the flaws of the Syndicate — but in the end, no matter what you say or do, she works for them. She wants to work for them. She is, in the words of a number of characters, “the investigation freak,” a fellow immortal elite out to do her job, no matter what the cost.
Which makes the brief moment of agency I had, to accuse or not to accuse, all the more curious to me.
“Investigator, peel back the shroud of inscrutability and bring forward the sweet smile of truth!”
Paradise Killer was a remarkable experience, even if it faltered at the finish line. I compared it above to Outer Wilds, another recent open world adventure game in which you solve a mystery. The difference, I think, is that the mystery in Outer Wilds wasn’t the point. Rather, it was a way to engage with a bigger, deeper story about culture and community in the face of apocalypse. In Paradise Killer, the story is the mystery. I was intrigued, initially, by its repeated question: “Fact or Truth?” But in the end, Lady Love Dies was too much of a company woman for there to be much of a meaningful difference.
It reminded me a lot of the works of brilliant fantasy writer Max Gladstone. In his excellent Craft Sequence, we likewise have a world in which gods, immortals, and mortals intermingle in a half-familiar world as the lead solves a mystery. And both follow leads who are a part of the elite system, but outside it for one reason or another. But Gladstone’s leads often want to change something, improve something. They have their own goals. What’s intriguing, and off-putting, about Lady Love Dies is that she doesn’t want anything to change, no matter what you as the player want.
Paradise Killer may be a minor masterpiece, but I guess when we say ACAB, we mean Lady Love Dies, too.
