Paradise Killer is like, almost there, but as a mystery story I find myself wanting in the execution and structure of the mystery.
I feel like the main issue with Paradise Killer is in it's open world nature, at the very beginning you're given a million leads and the complete freedom to pursue it, while giving a good opportunity to explore the island, it doesn't work as well with any other melding of a genre to an open world as the overabundance of leads tends to lead to a very fatiguing few opening hours as you run through lists of dialogue trees, maybe a few more when accidentally stumbling upon evidence in your trials, leading to more dialogue trees than you had expected prior and having to double back to re-question suspects on what you just learned and it all feels very padded as a result, most of my time was spent running around getting collectibles, or finding vending machines because I needed the currency to find evidence, and the vending machines lead to an extremely vital tool. This is where I think the open world nature of the game betrays its pacing since it never feels like you're really getting anywhere even when you're crushing your leads because of a few main aspects.
Firstly, interrogating suspects in this game is pretty flawed, I dunno how you made going through a list of talking points tedious but it becomes so with the world design, having to walk back and forth, or even if you fast travel its still a significant amount of time spent on commute, on top of all of this though the main issue is that suspects are generally pretty unresponsive, they deflect any accusation thrown at them, even with all the evidence in the world pointing at them doing even a step in someone else's crime, or even if the suspects are friends with you all of them reject and deflect any claim you make resulting in really poor feedback about the progress of the investigation, combine this with social mechanics of all things, requiring you to periodically check in on suspects to get extra clues and dialogue that are essential to finding the whole truth causes a really janky feedback loop, something that a mystery game pretty much requires to be satisfying.
The open world format I suspect was to give way to the fact that you can commence the trial at any time and lay your case down from the minute you touch down, with complete freedom on who you want to accuse, and the Judge's support if you have the evidence for it, which is a really cool concept in theory but in execution it doesn't manage to achieve it's goals because the investigation is extremely backloaded, by the time you get the evidence that I believe will make the story produce any satisfaction you've probably solved almost every lead by that point, so you're probably gonna be doing the trial only at the end anyway unless you really want to see what happens when the guy you suspect isn't the culprit gets executed for every charge anyway.
Paradise Killer is a super stylish game, a treat for the eyes and ears, with clear inspirations to games and works that I really like but forgoes the actual mystery aspect in terms of gameplay and pacing that I'm left a bit mixed on the final experience, the game just kinda ends abruptly. It's almost there though, the real execution and details of the crime are great and it was really satisfying to figure it out ahead of time, even if I feel the characters didn't really acknowledge that I had pretty much figured out most of the answers by a certain point.
I feel like the main issue with Paradise Killer is in it's open world nature, at the very beginning you're given a million leads and the complete freedom to pursue it, while giving a good opportunity to explore the island, it doesn't work as well with any other melding of a genre to an open world as the overabundance of leads tends to lead to a very fatiguing few opening hours as you run through lists of dialogue trees, maybe a few more when accidentally stumbling upon evidence in your trials, leading to more dialogue trees than you had expected prior and having to double back to re-question suspects on what you just learned and it all feels very padded as a result, most of my time was spent running around getting collectibles, or finding vending machines because I needed the currency to find evidence, and the vending machines lead to an extremely vital tool. This is where I think the open world nature of the game betrays its pacing since it never feels like you're really getting anywhere even when you're crushing your leads because of a few main aspects.
Firstly, interrogating suspects in this game is pretty flawed, I dunno how you made going through a list of talking points tedious but it becomes so with the world design, having to walk back and forth, or even if you fast travel its still a significant amount of time spent on commute, on top of all of this though the main issue is that suspects are generally pretty unresponsive, they deflect any accusation thrown at them, even with all the evidence in the world pointing at them doing even a step in someone else's crime, or even if the suspects are friends with you all of them reject and deflect any claim you make resulting in really poor feedback about the progress of the investigation, combine this with social mechanics of all things, requiring you to periodically check in on suspects to get extra clues and dialogue that are essential to finding the whole truth causes a really janky feedback loop, something that a mystery game pretty much requires to be satisfying.
The open world format I suspect was to give way to the fact that you can commence the trial at any time and lay your case down from the minute you touch down, with complete freedom on who you want to accuse, and the Judge's support if you have the evidence for it, which is a really cool concept in theory but in execution it doesn't manage to achieve it's goals because the investigation is extremely backloaded, by the time you get the evidence that I believe will make the story produce any satisfaction you've probably solved almost every lead by that point, so you're probably gonna be doing the trial only at the end anyway unless you really want to see what happens when the guy you suspect isn't the culprit gets executed for every charge anyway.
Paradise Killer is a super stylish game, a treat for the eyes and ears, with clear inspirations to games and works that I really like but forgoes the actual mystery aspect in terms of gameplay and pacing that I'm left a bit mixed on the final experience, the game just kinda ends abruptly. It's almost there though, the real execution and details of the crime are great and it was really satisfying to figure it out ahead of time, even if I feel the characters didn't really acknowledge that I had pretty much figured out most of the answers by a certain point.