Basically felt like a western indie dev trying to make Suda51's Danganronpa. I haven't read anything about the development but I expect if I do they will be cited as heavy influences because they're inescapable.

There are parts to like and parts not to like - the island is just slightly too big and a price was attached to fast travel to discourage it, so you feel like your time is being deliberately wasted as you cycle through interviews with the other characters. Music is diegetic so while there are great tracks, you're only ever catching parts of them as you move from place to place. The regular city parts have an excellent sense of place, contrasting heavily with the Syndicate's dedicated areas which are full of the same three purple statues. There's a weird artificiality to them that seems intentional but also not, because while of course immortal Cthulhu worshippers would build unusual statues, they would not be like this.

I liked Shinji, I liked Sam, I liked Doom Jazz. Lydia needs to learn septum piercings are always a deal breaker, Crimson is furry bait and should be burned, Henry needed more voice lines, everyone else sucked.

I really liked this game, but the grammatical errors absolutely ruin it for me. "Okay, you type your reviews like a menace" this is a published game. You should be able to use commas correctly. In this game, there are no (or very few) commas used with direct addresses. Instead of saying, "You should come to my house, LD." it's "You should come to my house LD." Incredibly pedantic, but it pisses me off so much because i actually liked all elements of this game. Im still rating it very positively- this game would not get higher than 4 stars for me even if this mistake was corrected- but seriously. I (obviously!! look at how this is typed!!) dont care what your grammar is like in your social media posts, just when it's a published work! With unintentional errors! It kills me!

Anyways, i loved the story, i loved figuring everything out, and i loved exploring! I played on switch and i would play on pc in the future because i think first person platforming is bad on switch and I didn't explore everything i wanted to because i am just a mouse and keyboard first person controls person at heart. but as a fan of weird ass mysteries, this really entertained me.

There's a lot I really loved about this game, but I think it fails in the most important way in that it's a collectathon without a satisfying reward. Sure, the world is fun to explore (for the first few hours before it gets REALLY tedious), but I want the reward for doing so to be fruitful. The trial is hyped up to be a huge moment in the game to cap off your efforts, but it feels so lacklustre. No Phoenix Wright-esque music to get you pumped about breaking the suspects, you have to individually go through each piece of evidence instead of having it all automatically presented after picking the appropriate suspect with all of the evidence already laid out, and the lack of animation/varied character sprites makes the particularly annoying characters' downfalls really unsatisfying. I spent so long rummaging around the world and finding every fact just for the ending to feel lacklustre.

I respect that they wanted this to be an aesthetically pleasing collection first and foremost, but I think the mystery/visual novel aspect of this game is severely lacking, which leads to an overall lacklustre experience. Having to run back and forth exhausting dialogue options with every character every time a new piece of evidence is revealed is so uninteresting. Let me engage with these characters and make the deductions/break them down myself instead of the process being fully automatic. It feels like the game is holding your hand, and it's not a great feeling.

The exploration and world carry this game a lot, as that was the only thing keeping me playing. I was definitely getting tired of exploring by the end, but I think it was a good enough game in that sense. It just sucks that that aspect didn't transition into the game's other personality as well as it should have.

I'd still give it a shot, but be prepared to be let down by the end

This isn't really a detective game so much as it is a collectathon, IMO. Not a bad thing, but the direction was initially surprising so I figured I'd mention it. If you collect every pick-up in the game, the conclusion is pretty evident, and if you miss even one or two pieces, you'll likely come to a completely different conclusion. There's not much "deduction" to be done, as the game basically spells it out for you if you find everything. Again, not a good or bad thing IMO, just worth mentioning up front. If you're into soaking up atmosphere while listening to synthwave and exploring a hyper-colored paradise, you'll dig the game. If not, you definitely won't.

It's a fantastic game with great music. I found the beginning a bit overwhelming but as soon as you get to investigating it get's really fun. Thorough exploration is rewarded and it feels very satisfying piecing the mystery together one by one. Don't be discouraged by the amount of collectibles - you get most of them simply by playing.

The world and the characters are very bizarre and intriguing since the world building is great. The ending was a bit weak but the rest of the game absolutely makes up for it. Really a hidden gem.

If gamers actually cared about getting games closer to 'art' they wouldn't focus so much on endless discourses on 'level design' and 'mechanics' and would instead turn their focus to reproducing what is done in Paradise Killer. This game actually uses its ludic elements mostly well, since experiencing and navigating the landscape is key to the way it crafts distinct 'senses' of what occurred in the island's final days. The use of memory and the necessarily empty yet evocative quality of nostalgia weaves into the skillfully used vaporwave aesthetic/city pop music. The game's aesthetic also clearly derives from a sort of Western nostalgia for the Japanese bubble, which itself is fascinating to see. There's probably at least a chapter in a book somewhere on the sensorium and capitalism in Paradise Killer. Or memory and ethnicity. Or any number of other topics, really. It is a very rich text.

What is interesting too is the ambivalence present in the movement. This is not a somber walking simulator, but one in which you are dashing and moving through the air with speed and it is quite fun at times. Until it isn't. Until that too becomes mundane and boring. That itself reflects some of the dynamics within the themes of the text.

It is not my favorite game, but it is very close to it and honestly it is probably the closest I've seen a 'game' approach transcending the label while also nonetheless having 'gameplay' and not simply being a point and click adventure or a visual novel.

Paradise Killer is weird as hell, but it's absolutely my kind of weird. I'm a big sucker for worldbuilding and unusual settings, and Paradise Killer sure does deliver that in droves. The world seems to be entirely built around juxtaposition; high-energy disco and jazz music imposed against the ghoulishly empty streets, the fantastical sculptures and temples cast against the grimey tower blocks in the town below, and of course the bright and cheery facade of the island in general cast against its horrific purpose and history. And this isn't a case of 'seemingly nice world with a sinister undercurrent'; the world of Paradise Killer is cheery, idyllic, suave, mysterious, horrific and terrifying all at once, and this is all quite apparent from the get go. It's such an interesting way to present a Lovecraftian/cosmic horror-type setting like this; I've never seen anything quite like it, and I loved every second of it.

Of course you need a game to go with the setting, and it felt like Paradise Killer's gameplay revolved around two fairly disconnected cores. There is a kind of collectathon nature to the game, where you're encouraged to scour the island, complete puzzles and platforming challenges to find various things. Sometimes these things are important clues which tie into the other half of the game, but more often than you're just finding money or snippets of lore. And I'm not sure this really adds too much? The platforming is often very janky, and sometimes things are hidden out of the way at the ends of areas with nothing else to see, and so this aspect of the game can come across as a little time-wasting (especially as the island is fascinating enough that I found exploring it to be its own reward). I do think on the whole I was grateful for the collectathon elements as a change of pace in between more intense investigative parts of the game, but it's definitely not where PK shines brightest.

The investigation side of PK, on the other hand, absolutely gripped me; I legit lost a fair few hours of sleep trying to piece together pictures of what might have happened from the snippets of clues I had at the time. The characters you spend much of the game interviewing are all fantastic with excellently written dialogue, and it is absolutely fascinating trying to piece together their motives and backstories. By the end of the investigation I still feel there were one or two things that didn't really fit into place anywhere, which was a little frustrating, but aside from that I think this is probably one of the best-written video game mysteries out there.

The other part of this project that has clearly had tonnes of love and care poured into it is the presentation. Paradise Killer is incredibly stylized, especially in it's UI and in little flares like character's VA's constantly blurting out catchphrases mid-conversation. I mostly like these touches, they help to make the game feel even more standout and unique than it already is, but it does lead to the game being a very full-on and generally loud experience that isn't easy to play for too long at a time. And of course I have to mention the music, which is fantastic and somehow fits the setting absolutely perfectly (I wouldn't even be surprised if the music came first and the game was designed around it). But there are a couple of presentation choices that I didn't get along with. Most of the VA is... pretty bad, to be honest, but this almost feels like a deliberate choice? I quite liked the weird things all the characters would constantly yell mid-conversation, but it feels like most of the VAs weren't really given much direction and the performances come off pretty weak. I also kinda hate the way characters are presented in the world. Every NPC in Paradise Killer is a static jpeg that is either locked in place or slowly rotates to try and face you at all times. None of the characters have any presence or 'pop' at all, and it just looks kinda bad... nothing breaks immersion like walking past a taxi driver too fast and seeing her collapse into an infinitesimal one-dimensional being, or walking straight past a suspect because he was standing flush against a wall and your brain just assumed he was part of a wall texture. I get that 3D models are a whole other thing and would look out of place in this world, but I would have preferred PK to do something like Doom where the jpegs are locked to always face you exactly. In fact, as a proof of concept, Paradise Killer does exactly this with the various inanimate collectibles in the game, and they all stand out from the world just fine.

So yeah, little things like the character models, outdated-looking textures and some stiff platforming controls do give Paradise Killer an unmistakable air of jank (topped off with its lack of autosave, which seems a bizarre choice to make in 2020). But if some corners did have to be cut to make this then it was absolutely worth it, because that time that was saved was clearly redirected into making this game as special, well-written and memorable as possible. It's a great experience, with a great mystery to solve and a highly satisfying ending, and this is one I can thoroughly recommend.

god where do I even begin

This game would've been better as a simple visual novel but instead there's weird 3d platforming gameplay hamfisted into a narrative filled to the absolute brim with unlikeable characters.

On that last point, I know you're probably not meant to like them because they're all selfish and have their stupid petty agendas against each other but there's a difference between a character having unlikable/negative traits and a character being straight up annoying. The cast of this game, including the protagonist, falls into the latter category -- interactions with them were a slog of unfunny dialogue, petty conflicts, and stilted relationships.

Cool setting, I guess. But even that means little to me. Wish I liked it!

The collectathon stuff slightly overstays its welcome but everything else about this game was great - the vaporwave x lovecraftian visual style, the insane immortal cult setting, the unravelling of an actually good murder mystery, the perfectly pleasant seeming characters almost making you forget the horror of their human farming, the banging music. Good shit

Couple minor gripes - fast travelling should've just been free (bet most players end up not using it until the end of their playthroughs like I did) and meditation could've lasted longer, gets annoying to refresh

Very bizarre game. It's like two different games bolted to each other. There's an open city to explore and find random crap that doesn't seem important, then there are 2D characters to talk to and commence the visual novel bit. The story is kind of interesting but it's almost like a madlib, where "normal" things are replaced by "wacky" things. Really weird, and yet oddly charming. The music has me grooving the whole time and the graphics are appealing, but on base PS4 there are areas where the framerate drops.