RECOMMENDING: PARADISE KILLER
i'll see you in a perfect 25
Well everyone, it seems we find ourselves here once again: Early January, aka the No-Fun Zone. While walking this weekend I had to forcibly stop myself from listening to The Beths’ “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” and accept that the bliss of the holiday break is over, leaving me no choice but to face my harrowingly real reality…
…is what I would say! Sike! I’m actually really excited for this year and have been feeling great lately despite the world currently being on fire. But still, the sickly grey skies, the realization that it’s going to be this cold and likely even colder for the next several months… this is not my favorite time of year. At least the days are already getting noticably longer, and before we know it we’ll all be living our best lives under summer suns, complaining about how humid it is. As I attempt to keep those summer days in mind, I’ve found myself revisiting a place that gives me a little taste of what’s to come. A little taste of…
PARADISE
I’ve been wanting to write about Kaizen Game Works’ stylish 2020 detective game Paradise Killer for years now, and the jump from 2024 to 2025 makes it feel like the perfect time. Twenty-five is an emotionally significant number—a milestone that lives in the shadow of the larger milestone it is a quarter of, but still a big enough integer in its own right to convey the sense that we’ve been at this for a while. Since the jump from 24 to 25 is a big motif in Paradise Killer, it pretty much had to be now. One of the many things I love about this video game is its incredible city pop-inspired soundtrack, which I recommend you listen to while reading this. I listened to it while writing this, after all, and I’m leaning heavily on its vibe to improve this post.
Paradise Killer sees you take the role of Lady Love Dies, an investigator and exiled member of an illuminati-like organization called The Syndicate, whose ageless members engineer island-sized social experiments that they believe will help them resurrect the dead alien gods they worship. When its Council is murdered while transitioning from the 24th island to the 25th, The Syndicate frees Love Dies from her prison in the sky to solve the case, the ultimate detective called down from the cosmos for one last job.
I realize this is a lot to throw at someone up front, but in my defense, these are literally the first things the game tells you. After boldly reminding you its name when you click New Game, Paradise Killer immediately forces you to read three screens of utterly inscrutable background text set to smooth jazz about the world? dimension? reality? you are about to enter.
After that, it’s off to a bar on the 25th island where two silhouetted characters are having an even less decipherable conversation about whiskey that is also not really about whiskey.
Don’t worry if you don’t understand what this opening is on about; confusion is the normal human reaction. But it’s also the point: More than remembering its proper nouns, what Paradise Killer wants is for you to know up front that it’s not interested in restraint. This is a wildly self-indulgent game that is full throatedly going for it the entire time, totally uninterested in easing you in to its bizarre premise. If anything sticks with you from this opening, it should be key terms like “Henry Division” or “Demonic Corruption Events,” not because they are plot-important (though they are) but because they are telling you that this is a story where people are named things like Henry Division and things like “Demonic Corruption Events” occur. And the normal human reaction to that is to say “hell yeah.”
Paradise Killer’s visual design makes an incredibly strong impression. The bar scene looks like a digital collage with hot pink text boxes slapped like stickers on top of a back wall lined with repeating images of impossibly lit liquor bottles. Stare at any one element too long, and the whole image’s artifice starts to reveal itself. But taken in as a whole, the stitches holding the clashing design elements together start to melt into something wholly unique. Take your first steps into its world, and you’ll find yourself in a bizarre bedroom that looks like what would happen if a marble column took acid. Gaudy golds, pinks, and leopard prints jut out against brutalist, monochromatic architecture.
Character designs are aggressively busy, with clashing colors and three or four too many things going on, taking inspiration from Danganronpa. The reticle at the center of your screen is heart-shaped. It’s gaudy and alien, but undeniably intriguing, giving Paradise Killer a slick visual flavor all its own. The game announces itself loudly with a maximalist, absurd art style that bleeds into every nook and cranny of the game and portrays a society of unimaginable excess. It doesn’t matter if its a giant statue or something as innocuous as turning your cursor into a heart—if there is a place Paradise Killer can squeeze in its personality, it will make itself known.
After a brief tutorial, Paradise Killer asks you to take an impossible leap from atop your skybound cell down to the 24th island below in a brief but stylish and unforgettable opening credit sequence.
sick.
From there, Lady Love Dies is free to explore the 24th island at her own pace. Most detective games like the Ace Attorney series put heavy restrictions on navigable space, usually opting for slideshow-like backgrounds with character sprites in the foreground. This genre tends to be laser focused on narrative, so the conceit of an open world isn’t necessary. Even those that do give you a three dimensional space to explore like Lucas Pope’s maritime detective masterpiece Return of the Obra Dinn limit their worlds to a small, focused locale.
Not Paradise Killer. The 24th island sequence is a vast, decadent open world whose clash of brutal geometry and alien sculptures will fuel an endless curiosity to see more. The daytime washes the island in an incandescent tropical glow, palm trees swaying on its beaches. At night, the wispy threads of winter auroras impossibly light up the skies, giving you the best of both seasons. But that picturesque paradise is cut by architecture that feels coldly functional. Dense apartment units jut out of the cement like spikes as electrical wires clumsily hang overhead. Its beaches are dotted with umbrellas and trees, but also with grotesque, alien obelisks. Secret tunnels cut swiss cheese-like pathways through its bizarre outer shell, and ziggurats hang ominously in the distance. It’s a compelling, one-of-a-kind setting that is both comfortable and disconcerting.
Moving through this world is one of Paradise Killer’s great joys. The game has a delicious, Quake-like sense of momentum and weight. Jumping mid-sprint hurls you forward with a satisfying inertia, selling the weight of your landings with a slight grunt a gentle camera shake. As abstract and insane as it is, the island feels like an in-universe setting first and an explorable space second. Though it’s littered with collectibles gleefully beckoning you to explore every nook and cranny, there are no floating platforms for you to leap to Mario-style (aside from one notable exception). Instead, most of your platforming will be directed by your own curiosity. You’ll frequently find yourself making tricky jumps from railways to bridge trusses to jagged cliff edges both to snag collectibles and simply because it’s fun. In my first playthrough, some of the most crucial, case-changing pieces of evidence I encountered were found on meandering walks, rewarding me for satisfying my “I wonder if I can get over there” exploratory indulgences.
If the game falls short anywhere, it’s that it locks a crucial double jump and air dash behind obscure, difficult-to-notice foot baths, preventing some players from fully enjoying the jungle gym Kaizen has built. But with all those tools in your arsenal, Paradise Killer gives you the sense that, with enough finesse, you can clear any obstacle—and you usually can. And if you mess it up, the opening credits sequence makes it clear that you can survive a fall from any height, leaving you to explore whatever new curiosities you may find fathoms below whatever high-altitude structure you just plummetted from. If you’ve ever wanted to play detective game where you can fall 1000 feet and 360 no-scope your way into an interrogation, you’re in luck.
Once you absorb its premise, the murder mystery at the heart of the story is compelling. It’s a triple locked-room mystery: The Council was murdered despite hiding behind three magically sealed gates and guards at the outermost entrance, and politics among the scheming members of the Syndicate are clouding the truth of what went down. Soon enough, Paradise Killer’s chaotic collage of alien gods and wacky terms will soak their way into your spine, becoming second nature and giving way to a plot full of intrigue and surprising depth. The Syndicate islands are a fascinating setting that allows Paradise Killer to comment on class, bureacracy, religious fanaticism, sexuality, and more, the truth of all things repressed despite its bursting scenery. Conversations with suspects are flowery and opaque, drenched in proper nouns that hide the speaker’s true intent. Others, like conversations with the game’s comedic, demonic mascot Shinji, do away with all pretentions.
Take a plot with fathomless intrigue, a fascinating world, satisfying movement and a banging, jazzy soundtrack, and what you’re left with is an incredibly hangout-able game. Paradise Killer can be enjoyed at your own leisure and is a wonderful game to pop on for short sessions of platforming and investigating. The more time you spend in this world soaking in its atmosphere and picking apart the wild knot of a conspiracy underpinning it all, the more you’ll want to stay forever.
There’s so much more I could say about Paradise Killer, a game I only grow more fond of the more I think about it, but this post is already a week (and a few hours) late as it is, so I’ll stop there. Its surprises and inimitable vibe are best experienced firsthand. Paradise Killer draws from a rich tapestrey of iconic games and lays its influences bare. But while Paradise Killer is like many other games, no other game is Paradise Killer. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Happy New Year! See you next week!