I played Paratopic roughly, like, 4-5 years before this, and the impression I had then was that there were interesting ideas hamstrung by just how… confusing and padded it was for what was only a forty-minute game. Now, replaying it 4-5 years later… my opinion hasn’t changed much. I credit it for its general artstyle and sound design (I love how grimy everything is), but… yeah I wasn’t really into much else. The conceit of the revolving protagonists is interesting, but for some reason the game actively tries to mislead you into thinking that it's just the one, and it's difficult to really tell that that's what the game's going for until near the end. Meanwhile… I can’t emphasize how padded this feels for what’s already not a long game. There are no less than three sections where you drive down an empty highway for five minutes, and when it's not doing that it's either making you walk slowly through a forest, wait for the world's slowest elevator to come down, or something else that doesn't really do much more than drag the game's runtime out. Nothing of substance really happens, and it feels like in the middle of giving the game its atmosphere the idea of attaching something more to it became second or third or fifth priority. And, admittedly, it’s a neat atmosphere… but ultimately, without much of a coherent narrative or defining idea for said atmosphere to support, this game feels… kind of vapid, more than anything. 3/10.