WALK IT OFF

‘Walking simulator’ might have been coined as a pejorative term, but we’ve always maintained it needn’t remain one – there are plenty of great games that fit the bill, after all. Paradise Lost, though, puts this belief to the test, with a walking speed that can only be described as agonisingly slow, and a sprint button that upgrades this to merely ‘painfully’. We can see the reasons, both diegetic (Szymon is a child in a world designed for larger bodies) and otherwise (all the more opportunity to drink in your surroundings), but it only serves to discourage wandering from the prescribed path, the next point of interactivity along which is always clearly marked by a floating ball of light. The effect is less walking simulator than monorail simulator.