- Paratopic A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux Buy Now $5.49 USD or more 'Paratopic is a short first-person horror game which draws ideas from Thirty Flights Of Loving but takes them somewhere terrible, leading them down an alley and through an unmarked door into a world which looks a bit like ours but just isn't right.'
- This is Paratopic, an experimental first-person horror game, one of the best-rated horror titles on itch, and one of Rock, Paper, Shotgun's best games of 2018. A narrative, horror tinged adventure game that takes you on a journey through a cruel fever dream world.
Paratopic is an experimental first-person horror game from Arbitrary Metric, an atmospheric retro-3D horror adventure through a cursed fever dream. Smuggle contraband VHS tapes across the border. Discover the remnants of illicit industry. Prepare for an assassination. You got caught smuggling VHS tapes across the border, and now there's hell.
Paratopic opens with you being interrogated by a border patrol agent who caught you trying to smuggle contraband VHS tapes across the border, and it quickly gets stranger from there, giving way to a scene where you're talking to the man who put you up to the smuggling job as some crows peck at a corpse outside. If you think something sounds off about that description, you'd be right, and indeed, the game largely thrives on that 'off' feeling, making you feel like you're playing in the real world if it wasn't for all these little details that don't quite scan and leading you to conflicting conclusions about the world of the game. Paratopic effectively leverages this cognitive dissonance to create a haunting surrealist work that succeeds by inverting the mundane and the uncanny.
In one way, Paratopic looks like your everyday noir story about smuggling contraband and murder in the Rust Belt. During your journey, you'll encounter the neighbor woman who's jonesing for more VHS tapes to consume, a talkative mini mart cashier who will tell you about the local attractions, and a verdant countryside dotted with rusting abandoned storage containers. No matter what scene in Paratopic you're talking about, there's something familiar to latch onto.
But very quickly, you realize that there's something wrong with these very mundane, familiar things. The VHS tapes that your neighbor is itching for are talked about in the same vein as narcotics. Whenever you talk to anyone in the game, some text pops up accompanied by some very unpleasant garbled mouth sounds that almost – but not quite — sound like words. Even simple acts like driving down the highway become suspicious and weird thanks to some mysterious disappearing cargo. Paratopic uses your grip on reality and twists it until you can barely hang on anymore, regurgitating them back at you in new, alien forms.
The same can be said for the overall look of the game, which takes inspiration from the blurry polygons of the PS1 era. But instead of making everything look as good as it can within the limitations, Paratopic embraces the inherent ugliness in the aesthetic. Your meeting with your boss for the smuggling job should have been the usual criminal meetup with a tinge of danger, but something strange happens as he talks to you: The camera zooms in super close to his face and reveals every ugly texture that the graphical style incorporates, the odd proportions between his head and his body, and even the very robotic way he moves his head as he speaks. Everything about the familiar human form is twisted into something unfamiliar and vaguely threatening in unexpected ways.
At the same time, the unusual is treated as if it's completely normal without anyone so much as batting an eye. The way the mini mart cashier describes some of the attractions is downright odd yet played completely straight, such as the milk store where you can buy milk from any kind of animal in existence. It brings to mind the similarly trippy Kentucky Route Zero, where odd vignettes played out as if they were completely normal even as you latch on to the very familiar and universal Americana themes.
Where Kentucky Route Zero is magical realism, though, Paratopic is a full-blown Lynchian surrealist fever dream. The cognitive dissonance works as well as it does because the game works so hard to keep you off balance in other ways, not the least of which is its non-linear, constantly switching point of view that encompasses multiple characters and doesn't necessarily happen in chronological order. Thanks to the strangeness of the setting and the fluid way Paratopic treats place and time, you never quite know what to make of it.
The result is a story that pays vague lip service to what its plot is, but is much more interested in creating a weird mood and making you question everything you experience. When you hear about aliens from the mini mart cashier, you don't know what the truth is. Everything you've seen so far feels grounded enough that aliens don't exist in this universe, but then again, your boss looked very alien-like and made overtures to his omnipresence should you fail. The segments where you walk through a forest feel very realistic and lived-in, but then you come to some arcane-looking graffiti and a shadowy figure who murders you and impales you on a pole. And then when you think you've got everything figured out, Paratopic hits you with the TV head scene, where a humanoid with a TV for a head has its flesh dissolve right in front of you. Because of how Paratopic paces its scenes so that you question it at every turn, you never fully get a grasp on what exactly is going on in the game.
I say that as high praise, as Paratopic is an exercise in lo-fi surrealist game design that plays with your head like a cat batting at a piece of string. By inverting the normal and the strange, Paratopic defies the player's expectations even as it works to purposefully establish them just to defy them again.
Upon first seeing this game, it reminded me a bit of Jalopy with its appearance and tone. While there are quite a few experimental games out there that play with how interactive storytelling is done, Paratopic pushes it with its surrealism, non-linear narrative, jarring cuts in between segments, and inadequate clues to make more sense of what's going on.
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Those visual similarities to Jalopy made me want to play Paratopic, and what I got was something with a few things I liked, but also many things I disliked. While I had a pretty okay experience with playing this game, my thoughts on it afterwards were somewhat discombobulated.
Paratopic is a first-person horror adventure game that was developed and published by Arbitrary Media, which is composed of Jessica Harvey, Chris I. Brown, and Doc Burford. It's own description reads as follows.
Smuggle contraband VHS tapes across the border. Discover the remnants of illicit industry. Prepare for an assassination. This is Paratopic, an atmospheric retro-3D horror adventure through a cursed fever dream.
It does give some clues to what it's about, but not enough to prepare new players for what they will get to see upon diving into this short and not-so-sweet experience.
NOTE: This is a full review, so here be spoilers. You've been warned.
DISCLAIMER: I watched the review by MandaloreGaming before and after playing Paratopic. The video first introduced me to the game, then helped me make more sense of the story.
Premise and Story of Paratopic
I have to admit that I couldn't get the premise and story of the game at first. This was mostly because it didn't occur to me right away that it featured three different characters, but knowing that made a bit more sense of the non-linear narrative.
You play three characters. First one is a smuggler who got caught delivering VHS tapes across the border. Second is a birdwatcher looking to take a picture of a rare bird in the woods. Third is a hitman tasked to kill a man in the back of a seedy diner.
Perspective switches between them throughout the game and their respective fates converge around the VHS tapes, which are not what they first seem. You'll find some clues at first as to what they're for, then you find out later at the end of the game
The twists in the story mostly involve the smuggled VHS tapes and what they do to people who watch them, as well as what they may be for. You encounter the figures behind the weirdness that happens throughout the story, and it may make you want to find out more, only for the game to end too soon.
However, each segment is abruptly cut to the next one without any prior warning or proper transition. Perhaps they intended the jump cut as the transition in itself, with the whiplash effect of suddenly popping up as another person in a different place and at a different time.
However, at least for me, this only served to confuse and make me unable to comprehend the big picture while playing the game. Maybe I could've paused and think about what's happening before proceeding, but it looks like
Presentation of Paratopic
Paratopic's lo-fi PlayStation-style graphics and dreary atmosphere set the tone for an unsettling experience. While it does remind a little bit of Jalopy, the lo-fi look also reminded me of Max Payne with how faces are placed on character models, but without changing facial expressions.
The sickly yellow-greenish tint that looks like puke adds to the off-putting atmosphere of the whole game, at least in the urban parts. It gets warmer in the countryside, making the game look like it was set in autumn. Whenever it may be in, the gist of the entire thing makes for a disjointed experience.
I do think the intent for this presentation is twofold—budget and imposing unease. If the visuals were able to be of a higher fidelity, it will still have similar characteristics like distortions, that puke-colored tint, and the ambient sound.
Gameplay of Paratopic
For most of the time, Paratopic plays much like the walking simulator it's touted to be by most who've played it. It doesn't have as much walking as Pathologic (whose name can be confused with that of this game), but there's still quite a bit for 40 minutes of play time.
The twists in the story mostly involve the smuggled VHS tapes and what they do to people who watch them, as well as what they may be for. You encounter the figures behind the weirdness that happens throughout the story, and it may make you want to find out more, only for the game to end too soon.
However, each segment is abruptly cut to the next one without any prior warning or proper transition. Perhaps they intended the jump cut as the transition in itself, with the whiplash effect of suddenly popping up as another person in a different place and at a different time.
However, at least for me, this only served to confuse and make me unable to comprehend the big picture while playing the game. Maybe I could've paused and think about what's happening before proceeding, but it looks like
Presentation of Paratopic
Paratopic's lo-fi PlayStation-style graphics and dreary atmosphere set the tone for an unsettling experience. While it does remind a little bit of Jalopy, the lo-fi look also reminded me of Max Payne with how faces are placed on character models, but without changing facial expressions.
The sickly yellow-greenish tint that looks like puke adds to the off-putting atmosphere of the whole game, at least in the urban parts. It gets warmer in the countryside, making the game look like it was set in autumn. Whenever it may be in, the gist of the entire thing makes for a disjointed experience.
I do think the intent for this presentation is twofold—budget and imposing unease. If the visuals were able to be of a higher fidelity, it will still have similar characteristics like distortions, that puke-colored tint, and the ambient sound.
Gameplay of Paratopic
For most of the time, Paratopic plays much like the walking simulator it's touted to be by most who've played it. It doesn't have as much walking as Pathologic (whose name can be confused with that of this game), but there's still quite a bit for 40 minutes of play time.
The smuggler introduces the game with his predicament of being given one last chance in doing his job. Meanwhile, the birdwatcher has a camera to take a picture of an elusive bird, and the hitman gets a gun to do his job.
Meanwhile, the controls are easy enough since there's not much you can do other than move around and interact with a limited number of objects. The car controls in driving sequences are similar enough to those of Jalopy.
Paratopic Transplantation
In Paratopic, the function of the gameplay is for letting the player explore the environment and understand what's going on in the story. The jarring cuts between segments made it hard for me to figure things out right then and there. Therefore, for me, it doesn't do a good job.
Final Score
ParatopicPros- Lo-fi PS1-like graphics
- Weird, dark, and serene in-game world
- Unsettling atmosphere
- Intriguing twists in the story
- Some interesting dialogue
- Fitting soundtrack
- Can be finished in one sitting
- Surrealism without direction
- Story is hard to comprehend
- Character perspectives not distinct enough
- Jarring cuts between segments
- Limited interactivity with objects
I don't completely regret having played it, but I'm not that impressed either. It actually has interesting concepts, but I felt everything was done inadequately. There could've been more done to make it passable, but perhaps the only real upside is it's only less than an hour long.
Paratopic isn't totally bad, but it's poor in much of its execution. The atmosphere and tone are what kept me from giving it a lower score, but the hour-long gameplay experience wasn't that fun or compelling either. The end left me puzzled and somewhat confused.
I can't confidently recommend this game, even to fans of walking simulators and experimental indie games. It does have some interesting parts and has an in-game world that can be built upon, but it will need a more substantial sequel to realize its potential.
But there's a bit of a silver lining. This makes me want to play Jalopy again. Maybe I'll review that game as well sometime in the future.
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Paratopic Switch
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