Paratopic Review

Alright, so I’ve played nothing like this game. It definitely reminds me of a few things, but, as far as a package goes, this is unique. In “Paratopic”, you play as three separate characters. The first is a smuggler who’s carrying illegal VHS tapes across the border, along with an assassin preparing for their mission and a bird watcher who’s out for a hike.

And, really, that’s the best way I can sum it up. This is also a VERY short game. My first run of it was barely over 40 minutes. In fact, the game has no save system, because why bother? So I won’t be talking a ton about the story until the spoiler section.

Alrighty then: presentation. “Paratopic” looks vaguely like a PlayStation 1-ish era game. It still has some nice looking effects when it comes to light and shadows, and the more you play, the more apparent it becomes that s0м3тh1Иg iS v3Яy wЯоИg. The entire game has a yellow filter, most areas are smoky or hazy, and I feel sickly just playing it.

The game is mainly set in mundane, everyday locations that you’re probably familiar with, but it’s just worse and decayed in every way. It’s like you’re in a K-Mart or Great Value brand of reality. So that definitely kept things surreal. It’s unnerving.

I wanna go home, but I AM home. The visuals are neat, but the sound, and particularly the music, are a high point. Sometimes, the music is barely there. One minute the game can sound like “Blade Runner”, then it becomes unsettling electronic noise. I like it.

The sound effects aren’t trying to be PlayStation 1 authentic, or anything like that. The sound design is incredibly well done. There is crisp and creepy sound, wherever you go. Including the voice acting. It’s not just reversed, but it’s not nonsense either.

You have the option to listen to talk radio while you drive. It reminded me a lot of being a kid, while my dad was listening to political radio, and I had no idea what they were saying. It’s that exact feeling! Yeah, these are… almost words I know. RADIO: “Itsego khom! It’s khom!” RADIO: “Cal Kohl’s tall kolmin.

And, huhm… a tolbren, kemd athali rune, day-K…” Then I noticed that in the seat next to me items were randomly changing out. So, in conclusion, this game comes the closest to anything I’ve played in feeling like actually living a nightmare. So, let’s talk about the gameplay and some of the story.

As I said before, there are three separate characters, but you don’t choose who to play as – you’ll just switch between them. There’s no loading screen or blurb – you just smash-cut into being a different person, or the same person at a different time.

What IS at the end of this cliff? Oh, goddamit! As far as mechanics go, there are some doodads to interact with, and these can affect conversations, along with a few other things. The bird watcher can… well… take pictures of birds, and the assassin can make one of the gnarliest headshots since the movie “Brick”.

And you drive. What I’m getting at is that, out of all the games I’ve covered so far, this is the most like a walking simulator. Not the action of walking – I have two “Pathologic” videos now – but I mean the genre of it. There’s a part where an elevator is moving at the speed of government, and you can only just walk around.

You hang out in the woods. Walking simulators love that. You can have conversations about how all the rich people are evil, and… it’s starting to look very familiar. You may not have played these games, but you likely have a good idea of what they’re like.

You don’t even have the option to crash your car in the driving sequences – you can only bump off the guard rail. While it is a short game, the driving started to feel like padding, because it ended up being nearly a quarter of my playtime. I get that it’s supposed to be helping to build dread, and it wouldn’t bother me if the game itself was longer.

You can listen to the radio, see what items change in the seats, and try to get the driving achievements, but that’s about it. There was still some fun stuff, like lying about not being interested in giant balls of twine, but when I played through the game for the first time, I was disappointed.

The moment I turned on it was when an action scene cut to driving your car for the third time. Then, right when things were getting really interesting, the game just stopped. It would be like watching “Enemy” and seeing Jake Gyllenhaal realize he has a doppelganger, and then the film just stops.

This only made me hate driving more. It felt like I got bamboozled. Were all these recommendations a prank? Did people think the aesthetic outweighed everything else? Like, what… what was I not seeing here? Even when the game played a VHS rewinding sound, which is screaming at you to replay it, I still went “Ugh… I see your blank achievements.

It’s probably minor.” So I was ready to acknowledge that I played it and move on with my life. But when the days went on, I kept thinking about it. It wasn’t the horror scenes either , but just everything else about the world. So I said “Alright, I’ll play it again… I’ll see if there’s more to this”.

And almost immediately, there was. I noticed something I wouldn’t have the first playthrough: the camera that the bird watcher has is on the assassin’s table in the beginning. I thought maybe one scene was out of order. Instead, a lot of the game is out of order.

I could explore a bit more and find some new things. Doors I thought were locked, just required more patience. Conversations that sounded like quirky indie game nonsense at first, had a lot more going to them. There were a lot more things to see in the driving sections that I initially gave it credit for.

I got a sense of how far out I was actually going, had some time to contemplate. This is a lot like a playable David Lynch thing. There was more to see than I initially thought. Okay, this might have just been a broom… I’m not saying there is a secret “Deus Ex” game in this.

It was still made by a tiny team with a shoestring budget. But I realized it wasn’t really a walking sim, and more like… an anti-walking-sim. I don’t know if there is a term for it – I’m making things up. What I mean is that a lot of walking sims can be braindead and not really engage you.

You walk from point A to point B and nice sounding narrator tells you a story, and then you’re done. Everything interesting was told to you, and you saw some nice visuals along the way. The horror sequences are enough to tell you that something supernatural is happening.

When you explore around more and take different options in conversations in later playthroughs, you realize just how fucking bonkers this setting really is. There is a shocking amount of information and lore given to you in this short game, but it’s given to you very unconventionally.

So, instead of just spoon-feeding you the story and setting, you have to think for yourself and put together what’s happening. So, if this sounds like your kind of thing, and you have five dollars and an hour or two to burn, I could easily recommend it.

You can get it on Steam or Itch. It’s a tiny experimental horror game that will test your patience, but it’s pretty neat. You can always play the game and come back in an hour or two, like we have a book club. So, if you don’t want spoilers, now is when you go.

We’ll talk about trains next time. Alright, goodbye, everybody! Alright, they’re probably gone by now. So let me try to answer the question “What the fuck is going on?” I still don’t have all the answers. I don’t think “Paratopic” gives you all the answers.

So this is my theory, assuming the game takes place in a real world, and not in nightmare world, like “Jacob’s Ladder”. So, first is the illegal VHS tapes. When you hear that, you might think it’s a JJ Abrams’ mystery box, or maybe just blackmail, or someone’s uncle doing all the wrong things with his niece.

Well, the tapes are the key to most of the story. The smuggler’s been tasked to bring them across the border by… something, the assassin is out to zap people involved in the tapes, and the bird watcher has accidentally stumbled across something they’re not supposed to.

So what exactly are the tapes? Well, when the bird watcher explores, there are a lot of destroyed trees, and the windmill is leaning very, very far. In fact, if you look around, there are a lot of destroyed or bent metal objects in the world. The bird watcher finds cargo containers that are bent and warped and thrown all over the place.

These containers have a symbol – the same the tapes are carried in. While local attractions, like the milk store, are just weird things that some weirdo in the gas station would tell you in real life, other things have a bit more to them. The gas station attendant talks about a lot of people in the local area who would have epilepsy, or get sick and die.

Or just other strange phenomena in general. You know – the electric rocks. He thinks aliens are involved. Well, he could be right, because, when the bird watcher is murdered, it appears to be by an inhuman being. So what did they stumble across? Well, the secret bunker in the cabin may have answers.

So, you enter it at your own peril, pass a bolted door, where impossible things may happen. And have. It’s not clear what this bunker was for, but something odd happened here. The bunker and the symbol belong to a group only known as the Power Company.

I don’t know what the project was, but they imply that it was dangerous and revolutionary. Whatever they did – it was massive. There is a giant metal dome with pylons across the valley. Something that still wouldn’t stick out on your first time playing.

The attendant mentions some buildings who’s shut down, and the Power Company closing down due to an unknown accident. The attendant thinks the plant was given to aliens. I think it’s a bit more sinister than even that. The company tried to tap into some sort of other dimension for a power source.

Whatever went wrong years ago, went so wrong that it’s still affecting electricity and magnetism in the surrounding area. But wait, there’s more! Because something else happened. Creatures from that dimension were pulled into ours. I’ll just call them “energy demons”.

The tapes are storing massive amounts of energy. The demons are able to feed off these, so they’re kept tightly controlled. Some can disguise themselves as humans better than others. The smuggler’s handler has a disguise that’s breaking down. He includes some weaker tapes for the smuggler to give his neighbour, who is one of the demons.

If you decide to give her this tape, she wants some of the other ones she calls “juicy”. So they have a feeding preference. Don’t give her a tape and she complains that she’s starving, and that the one you gave her before is all used up. No more dimensional Capri Sun left.

So she could go and feed off of it in her apartment. I do think they need it to survive, but it could just be a kind of drug. So it’s no surprise that more of these things are following the smuggler, trying to get their hands on it. The assassin is off to kill users and bring tapes to their own boss.

What all the factions could be I have no idea. One of them does seem focused on this windmill. It might represent where they crossed over, or maybe where their meeting place is, or it could have interfered with the experiment and caused the event in the first place.

The dome is right there – maybe that was too close. Now, if a regular human watches the tapes, or gets exposed to the energy, things can get weirder. Space-time might distort. You might just get sick, or unravel completely and cross over into the other dimension.

A demon beating the bird watcher to death didn’t just kill her – it also unraveled her body. It’s skinless, twitching, wrapped around a metal pole and its… arms look more like tentacles now. It’s like “A Roadside Picnic” or “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” Zone event happened, but it happened outside of Detroit.

Which, if I’m right, is a pretty dope setting. Then again, the place the bird watcher went to might not have security cameras, but instead cameras that make the tapes. And they killed her because they also eat human beings. The smuggler has boxes of what could be meat, and the 911 call calls the area “the meat works”.

But I still have a second theory. There might only be one of these creatures from the accident. The Power Company is still being run by people. They film this thing murdering and eating and doing whatever it does. The tapes become a combination of a powerful drug and a snuff film.

Everyone besides the black creature is still a human being. If you watch the tape without a precaution, you’ll be transformed and everyone transforms in a different way. You know, this guy’s face was shifting around like “Scanner Darkly”, and later it looks like he might have aged rapidly.

Assuming it is the same guy. Then again, maybe people are in the same time loop that the player is in. So then the tapes are addictive because that’s linear media, and that’s hard to get… I don’t… Whatever, look, maybe we’re trapped in the cycles of guilt again.

I don’t know. I don’t know anymore. Still, when I found the body at the end of the game, I was mad that things were just kicking off. So, realizing that it was actually the start of the smuggler and assassin storylines made me feel like a big dummy. So I was bamboozled after all.

So it’s a fascinating story that has plenty of room for interpretation. It is weird to me that I like it so much, since it has so few mechanics, and I typically hate games like that. If anything, it’s a testament to how well they did. Even if you’re here, and not really into the game, I’d still recommend looking up the soundtrack.

There’s some good stuff in there. I hope to see more from this world and more from this team, because the game is still disappointingly short. So, come back next time for a much longer game! That will be the last walking-simulator-type game for a while.

I know it isn’t, but you know what I mean. On the questions. Boy Named Sue: “What is the most disliked game you played, and will you do a video on it?” It’s probably “Duke Nukem Forever”. It’s not even the worst game I’ve played – it’s just so horrible already, and it’s making fun of other games, like it’s somehow better than it, when it’s just a redneck “Yakuza”… There will be no video for that, but there will for the runner-up, which is another Gearbox classic.

Pappeska: “Do you wish there was an “Age of Mythology 2” or another RTS game with a myth/reality combination?” I’d like a similar game. And I would have liked “Age of Mythology 2”, but 15 years ago. I don’t know what they’d do with it now. TheGriff: “What game scared or unsettled you the most?” It’s a weird answer, but, as far as remembering being scared the most, it’s that eel from “Super Marion 64”.

Really, that whole game had a lot of unsettling underwater imagery for me, and I think that’s still affected me to this day. Spencer Rutherford: “What game have you finished the most times?” I wanna say “Fallout: New Vegas”, but it could also be “Morrowind”.