Paratopic

Genre: First-Person Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Horror Bundle : Paratopic + Fatum Betula along with Fatum Betula, and it is also in Horror Bundle – 3 in 1 along with Fatum Betula and Blood Breed)

Paratopic is a Graphic Adventure with Horror elements that was first released on PC in 2018 and brought to the Nintendo Switch in 2020. This is a bizarre game that combines the visuals of the PlayStation One and the artistic sensibilities of a film school art project of a student aiming to be the next David Lynch.

On that first note, when I say this game looks like a PlayStation One game, that’s no exaggeration – extremely angular low-poly characters, repetitive low-poly environments, grainy low-resolution textures, and extremely high levels of pop-in all look like they were designed with Sony’s first game console in mind, and while you could excuse this by saying the game was done on a low budget or that it’s an intentional artistic choice, the result is the same – this game is ugly, with muddy green and brown textures, freakish looking human characters. This is paired with an unsettling soundtrack and weird incomprehensible noises substituting for human speech.

Of course “weird” and “incomprehensible” needn’t mean “bad” – great stories can absolutely be unsettling… however, it’s one thing for the characters to be incomprehensible, and another thing for the story as a whole to seem random and pointless. The game jumps back and forth from one scene to another without any logic or framing to set up what’s going on, with players driving a vehicle for agonizing minutes of nothingness, only to be walking around a forest the next, or chatting up a convenience store clerk about aliens.

What do these scenes have to do with each other? Do they have something to do with each other? What’s the deal with these VHS videotapes that seem to be some sort of contraband? Just how many characters is the player playing as? What’s the story behind them? Why is the game forcing me to spend another minute or two driving on a deserted road with no point to it? Why am I being forced to wait so long for a stupid elevator? Why do characters walk and even run so damn slow?

So much of this game seems designed to frustrate, or at least to draw out its runtime for no good reason. Perhaps the game’s designers wanted it to seem longer than it is – players are warned that they will have to play through the entire game without saving, but this warning is hardly necessary, as the game is easily completed within an hour… though afterwards, you’ll have no better idea what the heck it was about than when you started.

I keep coming back to thinking that Paratopic is some sort of student project whose creator thought was good enough to be released as a full product. It’s pretentious in the way only a student project can be, “experimental” in the way that no professional game designer would subject their audience to, and seems to think it has a lot to say without saying anything its audience is likely to understand. And while I’ll give this game credit for being “original”, that’s pretty much all I can give it credit for, and being original doesn’t necessarily make a thing good. Frankly, in Paratopic’s case, the result is not a good game at all, and while some might find it fascinating as an oddity, most players are far better off skipping it.

tl;dr – Paratopic is a First-Person Graphic Adventure with PlayStation One-era aesthetics and an odd, incomprehensible plot involving VHS cassette tapes, a walk through the woods, and long drives on empty highways. This game is bizarre in the same way an experimental student film can be, but its unique nature doesn’t make it good. Unless you feel like adding experimental oddities to your game library, skip this one.

Grade: D

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