Paradise Killer
Kaizen Game Works’ open-world detective game begins with a death-defying dive onto its sunkissed island setting. It could hardly be a more appropriate start. Paradise Killer is a daring, headlong plunge into a quixotic world, one that will initially leave you floundering and gasping for air. For its opening hour or so it’s as dense, confounding and overwhelming as our first visit to Night City, with its strange characters, unfamiliar terminology and arcane rules. And yet it’s similarly true to the spirit of cyberpunk: its retrorevivalist aesthetic brings together a diverse collage of influences, just as Barry Topping’s fantastic soundtrack marries city pop with jazz fusion, ’70s funk and disco. It’s almost too much, and yet you’ll realise that figuring out the workings of this uncanny universe is as absorbing as the process of solving its central mystery.
Its unwillingness to explain itself not only avoids excessive exposition, but makes narrative sense, since you’re cast as a character who already knows the place inside out: Paradise is, after all, on its 24th iteration. Yet moments before the 25th version is set to be activated – surely this one won’t result in a violent uprising or the arrival of deadly demons? – all members of the island’s ruling council are brutally murdered. A suspect is already in custody, but soon you’ll discover there’s something a little too neat about all this. As the formerly exiled investigator Lady Love Dies, you’re charged with digging deeper, as this multiple homicide soon spirals into a complex conspiracy in which seemingly everyone – from a horny Scottish doctor with robotic arms to a skeletal ex-assassin turned bar owner – seems to be involved to a greater or lesser extent.
“May you reach the moon,” they all say as Lady Love Dies takes her leave, though our investigation takes a while to get off the ground. Since you’re given carte blanche to proceed however you please – as well as determining when you’re ready to take your case to trial – you won’t necessarily find out just how crucial each of these characters is to the central plot unless you’re extremely thorough. As you explore Paradise, you’ll tease out a range of loose threads, between talking to potential suspects (and cross-referencing their statements with others) and some good old-fashioned sleuthing. Love Dies’ laptop collects your findings and helpfully arranges them into case files and investigation notes, but it’s up to you to chase down any leads, pulling them together and assembling a chronology of events.
There’s a lot to consider, in other words, as you criss-cross the island, corroborating and breaking alibis in turn, solving simplistic glyph-based hacking puzzles to unlock doors and uncover hidden evidence. As you manually install the last program you need to access the most secure areas, there’s a throwaway line that says a lot about its developer’s design philosophy: “Friction is nice. Makes things more meaningful.” And there is plenty of friction, not least in the clumsy firstperson platforming you’re forced to rely on to obtain items that are squirrelled away in hard-to-reach (and sometimes hard-to-see) places. You’ll also need to spend time gathering blood crystals, often tucked away in cupboards and on narrow balconies of apartments up several flights of stairs, to pay for fast travel – not just the journey itself, but to unlock each individual save point you can travel between. And you’ll need to keep some spare to pay a goat-headed information broker for extra clues.
These are choices that make sense, up to a point. The intent is clearly to encourage you to properly scour the place for clues, which you can’t do if you’re skipping from one shore to another. But Paradise is ultimately a little too large and awkward to navigate on foot, with some clues shoved in deliberately inconvenient places: by the end, we feel as if we’ve found as much evidence from stumbling across it as actively chasing leads. The in-game map is even more useless than Hyper Light Drifter’s. And though we can accept some fuzzy logic as a by-product of Paradise’s fantastical milieu, it’s possible to spend much of the game accusing characters of wrongdoing and have them still willing to hang out with you, deepening your relationship and leading them to open up – in more ways than one. We know Lady Love Dies is an expert investigator, but this is ridiculous.
Yet just as often Paradise Killer verges on the sublime. Though it respects your intelligence more than your time, there is a giddy thrill that comes from discovering what could well be the smoking gun through nothing more than your own hard work. The endgame, too, offers an extraordinarily satisfying payoff. Sure, there’s none of the courtroom tennis of Ace Attorney – and a halfdecent lawyer would shred some of your arguments to ribbons. But what the final trial lacks in 11th-hour revelations it makes up for in an undeniable satisfaction in the methodical way you present evidence, knowing that you’ve arrived there entirely under your own steam.
There’s one final frisson, too, in the way you can present your own version of the truth from the facts you’ve gathered. Given the penalty for each crime is execution, you can opt to withhold exhibits and statements to effectively exonerate those you feel deserve a less harsh punishment than the key players. At which point, we’re beginning to think maybe all this would mean less without those frictions. We’re still experiencing them even now: while we might be satisfied with our explanation for the council’s deaths, one or two loose ends linger, nagging at us even as the credits roll. For all those little frustrations, it’s clear Paradise Killer is going to stay with us for a while longer. It’s a considerable achievement for this tiny studio. Kaizen Game Works: may you continue to reach for the moon.
There is a giddy thrill that comes from discovering what could well be the smoking gun
BELOW At times, Paradise’s views live up to the name, but it’s simultaneously beautiful and ugly, with areas of grotesque opulence juxtaposed against the Brutalist architecture of the citizens’ homes