Paradise Lost
PC, PS5, Xbox Series
What does this Polish firstperson narrative game have to do with John Milton’s epic poem? Aside from the glimpse of a book’s spine in the opening cutscene – embossed letters spelling out the name of the author soon lost in a flurry of snow as the camera pulls out to reveal an endless frozen wasteland – we’re not quite sure. Even if we had to pick a literary work of biblical fan fiction to allude to, surely this descent beneath the earth, down through multiple levels of past sins, is more Inferno than Paradise Lost? Admittedly, Szymon, the recently orphaned boy you shepherd through the game’s underground environs, isn’t midway along the journey of his life, one way or the other. But, like Dante, he enters this underworld at ground level and works down from there, meeting his own Virgil along the way. You might notice we’re talking around the exact contents of these tunnels and caverns, and for good reason: discovering what lies beneath is by far the greatest pleasure Paradise Lost has to offer.
Suffice it to say, it begins with a bunker, its walls blighted with swastikas and Parteiadler eagles, and gets stranger as you go deeper. An early discovery: the Nazi Party has survived into the 1960s, and still holds power in Germany. Yes, we’re in alternate-history territory, with a ‘what if’ that has been asked many times over, but, in the case of Paradise Lost, it’s at least being asked in a fresh voice. PolyAmorous is based in Warsaw, a city that was razed by the Luftwaffe, and the studio knows its history. The game’s underground setting, known as Gesellschaft, has its roots in the real-life Project Riese, Nazi constructions dug into the mountains of what is now Poland and abandoned at the end of the war, their intended purpose still unknown. The plot, and supporting documents found around the world, reference Heinrich Himmler, Slavic mythology, the theft of Kraków’s Veit Stoss altarpiece, a secret expedition to Tibet, the Nazis’ belief in Atlantis, and a hollow Earth. (We’ll confess to being drawn into a second descent, down the rabbit holes of Wikipedia.) In a setting that otherwise leans on a lot of stock elements (nuclear winter, heavy vault doors, warring factions), these threads add much-needed specificity. Still, we’re not quite sure the game ever earns the quantity of Nazi paraphernalia on show, nor the rawer aspects of history it plays with, because ultimately it turns out Gesellschaft’s story isn’t the one in which Paradise Lost is interested.
Milton and Dante aside, there’s another major allusion at work here – one that announces itself with a title card that reads, in stark white-on-black capitals, ‘DENIAL’. The game’s five-part structure is built to mirror the Kübler-Ross model of grief. There’s an attempt to link this to the environments you move through – the anger section, for example, leads you through a warehouse stacked with warheads, and the site of an internal struggle – but it’s never quite clear what is being grieved for at this macro level. A national, cultural grief, perhaps, for the historical events from which this game’s fiction is spun? If so, we’re not afforded enough context to spot the parallels.
Instead, the grief being foregrounded is more microscale: Szymon’s, over the passing of his mother, as well as another character whose identity we won’t reveal here, the two building towards a climactic decision. This is a valid arc in theory, and one that few games have done well. But in practice it’s rather less engaging. It leans on science-fiction elements seemingly disconnected from the ‘what if’ conceit, and the telling is flawed. At least one late-game reveal pulls back the curtain on facts we thought had been handed over hours earlier, while certain plot mechanics remain a mystery even after the credits roll. This story is conveyed through a mix of spoken dialogue (which can be stilted, though never disastrously so) and all those letters, memos and audio recordings people always seem to leave behind. There’s a lot being told here, but not much being shown.
It’s a shame, since there’s plenty to see. At the micro level, spaces are populated in detail, right down to period magazine covers and greetings cards. Zooming out, there are moments of eye-widening spectacle to be found, too. We never quite adjust to the artificial sky of rock and salt above us, reframing architecture that might otherwise seem familiar. As we push deeper, industrial gloom gives way to faded opulence, eventually flaring into outright vibrancy. It’s a broad palette for a game set entirely underground, and arguably its most successful evocation of the theme of processing grief. The problem is that these spaces, impressive though they are, fail to tell any story beyond what you could glean from a screenshot. Environmental storytelling works by flattening time into space, leaving the player’s imagination to lay events back out in a line. There’s no development to be found in the details of Paradise Lost’s carefully crafted props – that’s all saved for cutscenes and diary entries. Exploring a room, we open empty drawers, turn over in our hands a tin of shoe polish or a pipe, but never learn anything more than what we could tell upon entering: that it belonged to an artist or a singer. This isn’t a story; it’s a setup for one.
The same could be said of Gesellschaft as a whole. We get a premise, or rather a succession of them, but these are never developed or resolved. The elements of Paradise Lost’s alternate history that keep us guessing throughout remain unanswered, while the more obvious plot beats of Szymon’s story are hammered out repeatedly. That leaves us with a pile of unanswered questions. How did the circumstances of the bunker’s top layer develop into what we find at its base? What are the implications of the game’s interactions with real history? And yes: why, exactly, is it called Paradise Lost?
We get a premise, or rather a succession of them, but these are never developed or resolved