The island on which Paradise Killer is set comes as an overwhelming assault on the senses. Pink, fluorescent, sparkling statues of the Gods adorn every corner and walkway, arms stretching up to the heavens. A temple looms atop a mountain, spilling over with the blood of thousands ritualistically sacrificed. Egyptian pyramids sit on the horizon, and a colossal gyroscope endlessly spins, sending sharp cracks of energy across the sky.
Pocketed amongst these bizarre and mysterious monuments lie the banal necessities of existence. Identical apartment blocks sit neatly on a grid. An agricultural field floods to provide food. Footbaths and sunbathing chairs suggest idyllic relaxation. This isn’t a virtual reality, even though its vaporwave aesthetic might suggest that at first. The island is a very real place, with form following functionality, as its chief architect is proud to explain to you.
It is not what I expected from Paradise.
The true nature of that moniker is just the first of many deceptions you have to come to grips with as Lady Love Dies, the ‘investigation freak’. There have been some murders, you see - of the ruling council of the island, no less - and everyone is a suspect. So, a living embodiment of justice seizes control of the island and ends your 8000 year exile in the hope that you can solve the mystery of whodunnit, and hopefully even why.
After a brief introduction to this end, the world is your oyster. Explore the island for evidence and clues, talk to the suspects and establish alibis (or break them), and try to unravel the mysterious web of lore and intrigue that weighs over the island like a heavy fog. In a similar vein to The Outer Wilds, you have the freedom to unravel the plot in whatever order you happen upon evidence, although there are some gates to your progress.
The first kind of gate is the one you would expect - certain knowledge and inferences hinge upon other knowledge. You can’t know to question someone about a suspiciously placed knife if you are yet to discover that knife. The second, far more infuriating type is that there are locked doors and devices around the island that can only be accessed once you have the necessary software to unlock them.
Mechanically these locks make the world feel metroidvania-like. You usually find them long before you can unlock them, noting their significance with the intention to return later. Unfortunately, they produced more annoyance than triumph as I continued to scour the island with no clear direction as to how to acquire these upgrades. When I eventually randomly stumbled upon them, it filled me with relief that I could actually continue investigating the things I wanted to, instead of embarking on seemingly irrelevant side quests in the forlorn hope an upgrade would tumble out of someone’s pocket.
It's particularly annoying because there are literal movement upgrades available to you that would have suited this ‘gated knowledge’ idea far better. It might open the door to sequence breaking, but that’s entirely in the spirit of trying to solve a messy case. This is particularly true when you realise that the game doesn’t actually require you to do much in the way of solving anything.
Paradise Killer is advertised as a detective game, but it's really only half of one. When you’re grilling suspects over evidence, following subtle clues hinted at by a mysterious ghost, or discovering weird and wonderful things by breaking in through a roof, it feels fantastic. Every new piece of knowledge you acquire is more valuable than any pickup or upgrade in a regular game, since every piece builds towards the greater whole. What you’re not doing is linking any of this evidence to anyone, or any other pieces of evidence, or trying to build any kind of grander case that explains how all these bits actually fit together. Your journal helpfully logs and categorises every piece of information you receive, by person and by crime. There are no false paths that you might follow, no dialogue options that will cause a suspect to lock up and ruin your ability to solve a crime.
It ends up playing more like a visual novel than anything else. You have to find everything, and you have to speak to everyone and exhaust their dialogue options - but once you’ve done that, the case is essentially solved, and the end game trial serves to link all of your data together in a concrete manner. Lady Love Dies is a fantastic explorer, and very good at asking annoying questions, but it's her personal computer that does all the heavy lifting.
And you know what? That’s completely fine! This kind of environmental, bitty storytelling is my favourite in video games - from System Shock, to Gone Home, to Prey. Rather than being explicitly told what is happening, you have to build a picture from contextual clues and varied accounts. I just felt that the investigative aspect of Paradise Killer has been exaggerated because of its subject matter - a murder mystery - when it actually ends up playing more like a story focused experience.
As you try to piece together the central mystery you also slowly start to figure out the nature of the world you’re in. Without getting too specific (since unravelling it is half the fun), the seductive visuals and gloriously upbeat soundtrack conceal a brutal and tyrannical system where the very notion of justice is corrupted. What makes it so interesting is that Lady Love Dies, and all the other inhabitants of the island, are complicit in this system as members of the ruling class, and seem to lack the capacity to question it. The tokenistic sounds that Lady Love Dies makes towards the ghosts of civilians come across as shallow in the face of the horrors that go on daily.
The entire notion of spirituality is corrupted in a similar fashion. We are led to believe that the inhabitants of Paradise Island are fervent believers and worshippers, refugees of a violent uprising against the gods that left them dead and imprisoned. But through conversations and reading bits and pieces of lore scattered about, it quickly becomes clear that reverence for the gods is the last thing on everyone’s mind.
Yuri Night is ambitious and ruthless, wanting nothing more than to rise to the top. Doctor Doom Jazz wants to have sex with anyone and anything he can get his hands on. Sam Day Break loves making whiskey. Even Crimson Acid, blessed by the gods with a goat head, only wants to be a soldier, and is mainly seen splashed on advertisements for soft drinks.
In the same way that there is a superficiality to the true nature of the island, the characters belie their supposed ancient age and purpose in their all together ordinary interactions with one another. Age doesn’t weigh on these people, and nor do their actions, as they scheme or frolic their lives away. In this sense the decision to go with a Vaporwave aesthetic rings true, with its surface level pleasant appearance concealing the banality of what lies beneath.
In the end, as I sifted through the last pieces of evidence before the trial, I was left wanting more. I wanted to know more about the island and its many previous iterations, the people who had lived there, and the endless wars that the denizens of the island seemed to face, facing attacks from both humans and intergalactic demons. I wanted to know the deeper meaning, the deeper truths. The paradox of Paradise Killer is that while there is much hiding beneath the surface, it winds up being uncomfortably familiar. And for all its strangeness, the truths you uncover are ones you’ve encountered a thousand times before, motivated by greed, jealousy and hatred.
Paradise Killer was a joy to play, and you should play it to. Grab a drink, enjoy the sunshine and solve its mysteries. Just never forget that what is Paradise for some is Hell for others.
