My journey with Paradise Killer has been a strange one thus far. It’s only been a few hours and I’ve already run through the gauntlet of how I feel about it. On paper, it’s a fairly simple premise – solve a murder by running around the island and finding clues, investigating leads, and finally, present your case about who you think did it. I’m nowhere near finished, but in a sense, I feel like I’ve got the gist of what it is. I’ll skimp over the more in-depth swaths of it until I finish it, but it’s a game I feel like I need to get some stuff off my chest before I finish it.
You’re playing as Lady Love Dies. You’ve been freed from your apartment where you’ve been prisoner for 3 million days because you nearly caused the end of island regeneration sequence because you were tricked by a demon. Still with me? It’s a lot to take in the first 3 minutes of the game. As you leave your apartment, you run into this guy.
After chatting with him, you leap down to the island to get your investigation going. And that leap is more like a re-entry as the drop is from the top of Space Needle stacked on top of the Empire State Building. Like the whole demons-invading-an-island-paradise-that-gets-recreated-when-the-demons-get-too-close-to-destroying-it plotline isn’t enough to drive home how odd of an experience this is going to be.
Your investigation has you wandering around the island, looking for clues and interrogating some of the other oddballs inhabiting it. You’ll find blood crystals hidden around, which you use to unlock fast travel points and get clues from “black market” sources. As you find clues and unlock points of conversation, your computer will start to make connections with suspicions and leads, making it easier to keep track of small details that you might miss or never make the connection to. It’s a smart idea thrown in to help keep the somewhat-confusing world a bit less so.
Admittedly, the first hour to hour and a half, I was a little less than impressed. It seemed to be going for weird for the sake of being absurd (remember the demon picture a few paragraphs ago?). The strange architecture can be a bit of a distraction at times, but the names of the inhabitants and the gods you worship are a little out there too.
Carmelina Silence. Doctor Doom Jazz. Yuri Night. Balthazar Tears. These are just some of the names of the characters you’ll be encountering during your investigation of the island. Sure, the names are odd, and the character designs match right along with them. The designer seems like someone who’s a fan of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and really had a field day with coming up with characters looks to match the names.
Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mind the designs at all. I’m actually kind of charmed by the obvious care that went into them. The combination of the names and the story right out of the gate left me struggling to get a handle on who was who and what exactly was going on with the island. I like absurd, but so much right up front left me feeling like it was absurdity for absurdity’s sake. It left a little sour taste in my mouth.
And then, something finally clicked.
It wasn’t that I dug into my computer and started reading the timeline and character profiles. While those things helped with me piecing together things, people, and events, that wasn’t what did it. Exploring the island and seeing just how free you are to explore is what did it. Sure, open-world games are commonplace these days, but to have a game in a genre that normally relies on linearity to tell its story allow you a substantial amount of freedom is new to me.
I picked the Ace Attorney comparison for the article title for simplicity’s sake. It almost feels about as far removed from that series as Assassin’s Creed does from Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. There are enough similarities that one could get a reasonable feel for the game if given the right comparison points, but it’s hard to convey just how much actually wandering around on the island, seeing the sites, and talking to the eccentric characters changes that. What sounds like a fairly simple concept turns into a list of bullet points that barely have the right being clustered together, let alone meshing together into something so surprisingly delightful.
Again, I haven’t finished the game quite yet. The first 90 minutes or so of the game, I wasn’t sure I was going to get any further than that. There wasn’t a specific event that turned my feelings, just the simple act of wandering around and investigating things in any order I wanted did the trick. Hopefully, Paradise Killer is able to stick the landing in the end. I haven’t seen the courtroom sequence(s?) yet, so I can only hope the level of craft and care were put into that area as the rest of the game. If they pull it off as well as what I’ve seen so far, consider this an absolute recommendation from me.
