PParadise Killer
The murder mystery that lets you decide whodunnit
PCP
Most mystery stories, for all the questions they throw at the reader, viewer or player, are founded on certainty. The detective character is a knife, cutting through a tangle of disinformation to reveal the truth. Once they do, it is absolute – mystery solved, no further questions, your honour. But this is very much not the case in Paradise Killer, a murder-mystery game where everything is uncertain. The dizzyingly strange world of alien gods and demons your detective moves through. The kind of game you’re playing, as it flits between 2D visual novel and Unreal Engine-powered firstperson exploration game. And most of all, the nature of its whodunnit – because Paradise Killer promises that there is no single correct answer to that question.
You play Lady Love Dies, an immortal investigator who’s been brought out of exile to solve the biggest crime ever seen on Paradise Island: the murder of its entire ruling council. Which brings us to the difficult question of what exactly Paradise Island is. Creative director Oli Clarke Smith’s answer begins in pre-history, when “alien gods came to earth, enslaved man, and fought wars across the Earth”. So, yes, this is a fantasy world with a long history, both within the fiction and without – the setting actually predates the entirety of Paradise Killer as it currently exists.
Last April, when Clarke Smith and childhood friend Philip Crabtree quit their jobs (at mobile-focused studio Pixel Toys and Until Dawn dev Supermassive Games, respectively) to form Kaizen Game Works, they didn’t have a solid plan for their first project. “We started out making a top-down shooter,” Crabtree, now technical director on Paradise Killer, says. “But we struggled to find what would make it distinctive.” They canned the project, but kept the setting: an island that exists outside of reality, ruled over by the Syndicate, humans granted immortality by the gods, which is constantly striving for perfection and constantly failing, being destroyed and rebuilt.
The version of Paradise Island you’re exploring is actually the 24th iteration, on the eve of its destruction to make way for the next attempt, nicknamed ‘Perfect TwentyFive’. Whether this is a metaphor for the game’s own development, Kaizen doesn’t say, but it certainly fits. After the shooter was put aside, the pair started working on a “walking simulator, quote unquote, which was a lot less mechanically dense,” according to Clarke Smith. Eventually, though, they landed on their big idea: “what if we make
a murder mystery game that’s completely open-ended, completely non-linear, where there’s no right answer – it’s just up to you to prove your version of the truth?” From there, Paradise Killer mutated into a much more systems-driven game, the version we’re now playing in pre-alpha.
We explore the island in firstperson, looking for clues and interrogating suspects in whatever order we fancy. When we do encounter a suspect, or any other character, they take the form of static sprites dropped into the 3D world. It works, just about, because every single aspect of Paradise Killer is aggressively stylised. The world is rendered without normal maps, exposing the raw geometry beneath, while the UI is inspired by vaporwave, with 16bit-bright colours and layouts that look like they were cooked up using PowerPoint 97. The backdrop to your conversations is provided by heavily treated stock photos which look like they’ve been filtered through MS Paint.
The effect lands somewhere between a Grimes record and the Dreamcast games the two developers grew up playing. Explaining how these disparate parts fit together, Clarke Smith points to the pair’s days in a punk band, reading zines and handwriting liner notes for the CDs they’d try to sell at shows. “That kind of clunky DIY aesthetic helps tie the disparate elements together.”
Crabtree says they’re not afraid of leaving some sharp edges in their game. “Things can be surprising, things don’t have to blend smoothly and gently into each other,” he says. “Not just sharp in the sense of the angles and the polys we’ve used, but in the way something sits in the world.” As you play Paradise Killer, you encounter odd moments and ideas which jut out, as if two different games are pushing against one another like tectonic plates under the surface. A puzzle seemingly lifted from an early Resident Evil; a handful of Romanian vocabulary tossed into dialogue; a fetch-quest ghost you summon through meditation; the simple fact that this is a detective game where you can unlock a double jump. “We wanted to make it this blend of things we like,” Crabtree says.
All of which sounds incredibly ambitious for a two-man team, in the same way strapping wax wings to your back and heading for the sun is ambitious, but they seem pragmatic. At least, relatively speaking. The decision to use 2D character models, for example, was informed by practical considerations as much as art direction – Kaizen is a two-man team (with the aid of artists Curran Gregory and Rachel Noy) without any experience in animation. “When
“When you set out to make a videogame you can do anything – but not everything”
you set out to make a videogame, you can do anything – but not everything,” Clarke Smith says. “And characters were not a battle that we wanted to fight.” This is smart, because the central idea of Paradise Killer itself is so bold, so close to that burning-hot sun, that you suspect Kaizen needs to focus all of its energy on pulling that off.
You’re free to decide what to investigate, collecting evidence like items in your
inventory as you go, but more importantly, at any point from half an hour into the game, you can choose to return to the judge who handed you this case and trigger the climactic trial. “That’s the point of no return,” Clarke Smith says. You present your evidence, make your case, and the Judge rules whether you’re right or wrong. Case closed.
Vitally, though, that ruling has nothing to do with which suspect you’ve picked. “The judge never says, ‘You’ve got that wrong’,” Clarke Smith says. “The judge says, ‘You haven’t got enough evidence’. And it’s not a systemic thing where we say, ‘Well, you’ve got three out of five, that’s good enough for a conviction’, because no two pieces of evidence are equal in importance.”
Kaizen describes the trial as a discursive process, with an epilogue section to show the consequences of your decisions, but we didn’t get to experience this aspect of the game for ourselves, and the team are understandably tight-lipped about the specifics of their ending. Which, perhaps appropriately, makes it very hard to make a solid judgement on Paradise Killer. More than most games, its success will hinge on this big finale, because any murder-mystery story is only as good as its parlour-scene reveal. Even if you’re the one making up the answers.