pyat

I first heard about Paradise Killer during the covid pandemic, when my friend Draque enthusiastically recommended it to me as exactly my sort of thing. Looking at it, I figured they were right, so I jumped into it and started exploring, though I didn't get far. I recall it seemed like it was more than I could handle at the time, so I got distracted onto other things. More recently, as I've been exploring other deduction-related games, Elanna brought it up, saying more or less the same thing Draque did. I recalled playing it, and since I have still been in the mood for deduction games, I jumped back in (starting a new game of course since it's been years). This time I had the focus, I dived deep in and really loved the game.

Once again I am faced with the weirdness of what 'genre' means in video games. If 'genre' refers to mechanics, Paradise Killer is a combination of a detective game and a collectathon. You talk to people and gather clues, but a lot of the gathering involves traversing an elaborate 3D landscape where it's clear you're intended to explore everything, sometimes via highly questionable parkour. The game does a clever thing of demonstrating that you don't need to worry about falling by opening with you having to fall down from the literal highest point on the map to the lowest, resulting in just a grunt and a safe walk-away. You even get traversal powers to make it easier to get to more weird places, and (a thing every collectathon should have IMO) a power to help you see where uncollected things are.

I love both detective games and collectathons, so that already makes it my kind of thing, but that description really undersells what makes the game fascinating. Because if 'genre' was used the way it is in other narrative works, to talk about setting and character, then Paradise Killer is distinctly New Weird, emphasis on the weird. The place you're exploring is a psychically conjured island in a pocket universe where immoral immortals are trying to bring back dead alien gods while defending themselves from ravening alien demons. The island itself is styled so that nearly every viewpoint could be a City Pop album cover, with occasional forays into death metal instead, and the characters themselves are dressed in fashions that would make Tetsuya Nomura and Hirohiko Araki say "maybe that's a bit much."

Solving the mystery of the island's slain ruling council requires talking extensively to all of them, finding well-hidden secrets, and--most interesting of all--deciding just what to argue at trial. This is the most-touted part of the game, but I didn't entirely get it until I was going through the game's final sequence. Unlike in a game like Phoenix Wright, where there's one sequence of witnesses to press with one chain of evidence, the question of "proof" in Paradise Killer is somewhat open-ended. Enough misdeeds and machinations have taken place that collecting more evidence can just require more judgement calls about who was ultimately culpable for the crimes you're investigating. I was halfway through the trial once when I realized that I was presenting evidence against someone I felt had been manipulated, that would still lead to their conviction, so I started over, argued a different way, and was able to spare them. This did not feel like favoritism or legalese, it felt like justice.

The world of Paradise Killer is one in which it's difficult to find justice. You're investigating on behalf of folks who think nothing of sacrificing thousands of people to their gods to live their own debauched lives, and they're not even very nice to each other on top of that. Your character, recently returned from exile, is in a position to have rethought some of the foundations of their society, and can express that in dialogue (a huge relief to me when I was able to have those moments). You cannot, however, entirely escape that society, within the bounds of this game. The best you can do is find the small ways to make it more just, one accusation or acquittal at a time. I find myself wishing for a game in the future where I could use similar mechanics to take the whole system down, but as it stood, I was still utterly enthralled (and delightfully discomfited) by vaulting through this bright shiny dystopia to find the secrets within.