Paradise Killer (PC, PS4, Switch)
by Don Everhart, Contributing Editor
In Paradise Killer, Kaizen Game Works has made an occult murder mystery game inspired by vaporwave visuals with a city pop soundtrack, all screaming with aesthetics popularized online. Underlying the neon colors, maximalist fashion, and brutalist civic architectures of the game are the characteristics of noir. These are prominently expressed in how the game establishes and repeats differences between cops and investigators. Noir protagonists are often at odds with cops and criminals alike, even while they deftly move between them. This very much describes the movements and approach of the protagonist of Paradise Killer, Lady Love Dies. She is the so-called “investigation freak” who asks uncomfortable questions and who roots through everyone’s business, cloaking herself in an obsession with uncovering difficult truths.
Players enter Love Dies’ story on the 3,000,000th or so day of her exile to the “idle lands,” a pocket dimension that hovers above what is meant to be perfection. Perfection, in this case, takes the shape of an island basking in the tropical heat of the Reality Folding Drive, a power plant bursting with the energy of eldritch gods fueled by bloody sacrifice. A cabal of fellow eternals have made 25 attempts at such islands, but corruption from transdimensional demons and gods has tainted each one so far. On the night of the transition between the 24th and 25th islands, things do not go entirely to plan. That’s because the high council of the cabal (or, using in-game terminology, The Syndicate) is slaughtered in their top-secret meeting chamber. As a result, the island’s Judge makes the decision to recall Lady Love Dies from her exile to investigate.
In the intervening 8,000 years, assorted acts of social climbing, forbidden trysts, exploitation, and paranoid madnesses associated with being eternal demigods have ensued. This is great, since it allows Love Dies to work as an outsider. She’s not a cop, she’s an investigator. Love Dies is unafraid of speaking truth to power, however inconvenient those truths may be. Everyone is under suspicion, and those who did not move to the 25th island before the murders have to stay put, whodunit-style. The way that I played as Love Dies, the power elite of the island were subject to every question, often put bluntly and with suspicion. She had little decorum in her movements about the island, either. I imagine Love Dies’ fellow immortals watched from their balconies, shaking their heads as she hopped, goatlike, up the island’s hills and over its rooftops, rooting through every side yard and slurping down the last drink from every vending machine to be found. Hey, cut her a break - she hasn’t had a canned coffee in a thousand mortal lifetimes.
The whole of the 24th island is open to Love Dies from the moment she leaps from her sky high apartment in a prolonged fall that recalls the excitement of many contemporary battle royale matches. That fall establishes a few distinctive elements of gameplay: first, that the island holds an array of different landmarks and interconnected neighborhoods to explore; second, that players should be unafraid to take wild leaps; and third, that Love Dies is unharmed by falls from any distance. Free roaming is further encouraged by the range of collectables and currency that are scattered around the island. That currency consists of blood crystals that a lesser demon has redistributed in a spree of nihilistic anarchy, which results in a plentiful amount of walking around money. That’s a good thing, as those crystals are useful for everything from activating fast travel to purchasing information from an old flame with a goat’s head. Money, in this case literal blood money, talks.
As the island was initially saturated with such items, I was always on the lookout for anything that was collectable or interactive. At times, this slightly broke what could have been an intended sequence of events that would arise from meeting an interlocutor and chasing a clue. However, Paradise Killer handled these moments elegantly, with Love Dies simply stating that she had already found an item or piece of information if it was something that I had already found. With that said, I gradually had to change my approach as I narrowed down the number of remaining clues and pieces of dialogue. Love Dies’ digital tablet became increasingly essential as I ran down leads between neighborhoods and characters, working to ensure that I had all the material that I desired for the game’s finale: the trial.
Just like the game’s open approach to exploration and fact finding, that trial is set up to meet players where they are at. As such, a player can start the trial at any time. If players haven’t collected much evidence, it will amount to a kangaroo court for a demonically possessed member of the island’s underclass. The more a player works to explore the island, collect evidence, and speak with characters, the more options they will have during the trial. But while a player may have the evidence to implicate a character, they may choose not to. Knowing that the punishment was execution on the spot, I found myself reluctant to issue some accusations. The bloodlust of the Judge (and, depending on how one plays, Love Dies) became for me a complicating factor that played into the game’s frequently repeated phrase that facts and truth may not be the same.
As much fun as the setting and its characters are, there are plenty of improvements that could be made to the game. While similar in its approach to many visual novels and investigation games (Danganronpa and the Ace Attorney games come to mind), there are too few voice lines in Paradise Killer to accompany the amount of dialogue. That leads to a lot of auditory repetition, some of which can be a little disconnected from that text. There also isn’t much substance to the investigative elements to the game - even with my undirected, semi-random walks and my complementary approach to conversation and interrogation, I found myself regularly stumbling on key items and catching my interlocutors in lies. That might be a bit too forgiving of an approach for those looking for deeper, investigation-centric gameplay. Mechanically, objects frequently clip through walls (at least on the Switch version), which can give away the location of assorted collectables. And while the ability to run and jump in unrestricted ways brings me joy, my kingdom for a few more movement options, perhaps a Thief-like mantle and climb! With all of that said, Kaizen Game Works doesn’t seem to have focused as much on polished mechanics as they did on crafting an open environment, complex lore, and intriguing characters. As a result, none of the game’s minor issues or my desires for a little bit more in some categories has gotten in the way of my good time.
I’m confident that other players could take a different approach to playing Paradise Killer, given Love Dies’ all-access pass to its setting. I probably could have taken a more directed route, following clues and using the map to plan my travels from one location to another. But why do that, when I can run amok? Love Dies has plenty of character, but not so much that it inflexibly locks a player into a certain way of playing the game. In a sense, that’s the best endorsement that I can provide: Paradise Killer throws players into a fun and rich setting, populated with quirky and flawed characters, and encourages us to let our imaginations handle the particulars of how to play the game.
