The graphics (as well as the artstyle / direction) are surprisingly nice to look at. The score is also very good - I think it ties the atmosphere of the game together really well. Sometimes it plays too loud and it's hard to hear the dialogue, but that's not the composer's fault.

The gameplay and general design of the game is pretty much garbage - and that's coming from someone who actually enjoys walking sims. First of all the main character moves way too slow and there is no sprint button or anything like that. Second of all, the interaction system sucks ass. You basically have two ways of interacting with the environment - by walking up to something or by clicking. The first way is fine, but for the second you not only have to be embarrassingly close to be able to trigger it, but there is also an annoying "mini game" in which you have to click, move and hold your mouse for the interaction to trigger. And I know what you're thinking - "wow, the guy played a walking sim which actually requires player input and is annoyed" - but the minigame is a) sluggish, b) too frequent (it happens every time you pull a lever, open a door, etc.) - both of which combined with the slow movement speed make the game, boring, annoying and borderline a torture to play through (at times I really wished I was watching a YT walkthrough instead). And third of all - the collectibles. There are three types of those: notes, items and audiologs. Notes are pretty much what you'd expect, except once you read them they aren't available in the menu or anything so you can't revisit them. Then there are items which you can pick up. And that's it - there is no description, you don't add them to any collection or anything, you can't even fucking rotate them. These aren't even like interesting items, in my playthrough I picked up a bottle of alcohol and a ceramic tea cup, both in act 1 iirc, so idk, maybe the devs realized there is literally no fucking point to it and just decided against it in the end (or alternatively it was just an awkward tutorial for story items, which you use for some extremely primitive puzzles later on in the game). And at last the audiologs. They are fairly interesting, but again, there is no way to experience them outside of just fucking standing right next to them - you can't pick them up, you can't walk away because the sound disappears. And it's so weird because for the most part they are fairly relevant to the main story, so I'd imagine the devs would want the player to listen to them. It's funny, because the rest of the storytelling in the game is on the exact opposite side of this - for the most part you're forced to stand in one place and listen to conversations with literally no way to interact with everything.

And since we're on storytelling, let's talk about it. It can kind of be divided into two parts - the relationship between the two main characters (Szymon - the playable character - and Ewa - the voice on the radio), and the history of the bunker you're in (the story is a fictional take on post WWII era with some sci-fi elements, and the bunker was supposed to be like an utopia built by the nazis), the latter of which is told through the collectible audiologs, as well as voice recordings on a supercomputer you can access at various points of the game. Both of these intertwine at many points of the game, let's stick with these categories anyway.

If it comes to the dialogue sequences between the two main characters I'd describe them as badly written. There are a lot of cliches (the need to form trust between each other etc.), which in itself isn't bad. What makes it bad is the way these interactions are written - let's take the trust thing for example. There is a scene in which the Ewa is guiding Szymon and he's supposed to cross to the other side of a pit through a pipe, but the pipe is broken. The girl tries to convince him to jump for it and he asks something like "what if I don't want to?" and then she gives him like a whole speech about how he needs to trust her, how he has free will and how if he doesn't do it he will later be thinking "damn, what if I actually jumped back then" and in the end he does take the jump and it's like... what??? Aside from the obvious gaslighting and giving the player an illusion of a choice (you can sometimes decide what the boy says by choosing one of 2-3 options) this whole interaction just feels forced. It feels like the writers didn't really have a good idea for a dynamic between the two characters so they just decided to mark the all obvious tropes without giving it any thought. There are also constant plotholes in their dynamic which add to that, but it's too much to get into. That feeling more or less stayed with me for the majority of the game. It was also amplified by the fact that Ewa is just not a well-written character all together. She's reckless, she only thinks about herself, and all the attempts to make her relatable / likeable were pathetic at best. There is this "huge plot-twist" near the end which is pretty much all about her , but you can see it coming from like chapter 2 (out of 5). It's funny, because most of it truly unveils in chapter 4, by which point everyone has it figured out. Everyone with the exception of Szymon, who's just going "wait what? this doesn't make sense!" for the whole chapter. It's honestly the funniest shit ever. All of the VAs in the game also speak English with a Polish accent, while sometimes saying singular words / expressions in Polish. As a Pole, I didn't mind it THAT much, but I recently watched Michael Mann's "Ferrari", which is similar in that aspect, so I'd imagine the experience can be a bit cringy for people not familiar with the language.

Then there's the story of the bunker, and this one actually explores some interesting ideas. There are actual layers to it - on one hand you have the story of the fallen Nazi community and on the other there is the group of Polish people who reclaimed the bunker from them. Both of these groups have their own internal conflicts and it's interesting to watch them unfold (despite all of it being through audiologs, or using the supercomputer, both of which limit player input to zero). For the Nazis there is also the thing about how the bunker was supposed to be utilized, which is at times questionable in quality, suffering from similar problems as what I mentioned earlier. I'm now going to describe a specific instance of it that I just can't get out of my head, and how it perfectly encapsulates the problems of this game’s writing, so spoilers in the next paragraph (although it’s pretty much the meat of the review, so if you’re not interested in the game I suggest reading it).

So at one point of the game you find a note that implies that the Nazis had some frozen Aryan sperm stashed within the bunker. Sometime later you get to a room built out of six chambers for people to live in. There’s also an elevator there, which takes to an underground classroom. The implication is that the Nazis impregnated some women with the sperm and took the kids after they were born, while giving the mothers very limited options to visit their children, which (at least to me) is a pretty basic way to describe the horrifying ways of Nazis, but whatever. During my playthrough I also found a room behind a locked door, which Ewa told me not to open, because she didn’t think any good can be found in that place. I went ahead and opened it anyway. The room was small and pretty much empty, aside from a TV hanging from the corner and a dentist chair with metal clasps next to where the legs go. Ewa then said something like “this is where they impregnated these women”. And that line stayed with me for hours after finishing the game. Not because it was particularly shocking, but because I couldn’t make sense of it. Like I said, there were only 6 chambers, so there couldn’t have been more than, I don’t know, 18 women there? And unless unfrozen sperm is harder to work with or something, impregnating someone with it would take like what – 10 minutes? Even less probably. So like did they just spend one day impregnating all the women and then the room stayed empty for the rest of time? Why did they not repurpose it? But with time I realized two things. For one, I’m a fucking moron (which I was actually aware of already but you know). And for two – the room was probably used for checking how the pregnancy is going, doing ultrasounds and all that shit, Ewa just worded it in a way that focused on that one aspect. And this highlights the one problem the writing of the entire game suffers from – they make you take everything at face value. “This is the part where they start to trust each other”, “this is the part where a conflict between them happens” etc. The game doesn’t even believe you’ll actually look critically at the writing, so it just gets through all the “necessary” stuff, without giving it enough care. It doesn’t want you to think about it, it just wants you to accept it. That obviously a terrible approach, and truth be told unless this is the first narrative project the writers of the game worked on, I don’t really see an explanation for it. I would say there is one, singular attempt at rewarding the player story-wise in the form of foreshadowing. Foreshadowing, that is done so badly, that I truly believe it might be the worst instance of it I’ve seen in any media ever. At one point after you learn Ewa’s name, you can choose a dialogue option to ask about it. You can call her Ewa, or you can call her Eve. Eve is the name of the supercomputer you use throughout the game. Can you guess what happens at the end? I sure as hell could’ve. In the middle of chapter fucking two out of fucking five. Of course, it’s not like I had every detail figured out, but come on – what’s the point of even having a plot twist if you’re just going to give it away? The fun of plot twists doesn’t come from being able to figure it out, not from just fucking knowing it.

I think the game as a whole is a perfect example of “I’ve had a great idea, but then I tried to do it”. The core of the story is genuinely interesting, but the devs crashed and burned while trying to translate it into a video game – both from gameplay and script perspectives. I definitely do not recommend anyone to play through the entire game, but you could probably find some cool stuff just by watching a YT walkthrough.

Paradise Lost is a great example of a walking simulator game that lures you in with pretty graphics, but in the end has no content behind those graphics. The story is quite predictable and boring, with the ending kinda trying to be interesting and shocking, but still failing at it.

The game does refer to some of the horrible stuff the Nazis did, like in example the lebensraum programme, so be prepared for that. It's not fun, but it does add something interesting to the game.

The gameplay is tedious and slow, the ending is predictable, but alright in the end, so it's not a game that I would recommend at full price but if you can get it at 50% off or more, then I guess it's a good investment.

A kind of interesting story, set in a mostly interesting setting, told in a very uninteresting way.

This game is the standard walking simulator stuff: i.e. exploring the environment at an irritatingly slow pace, telling the story via audiologs with sometimes ropey voice acting and a stack of letters and notes left lying around giving you tons of things to read instead of playing a damn game.

Whatever. Just don't bother. I really wish I hadn't.