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.