Paradise Killer

When Love dies, only the facts remain!

Paradise Killer is a cool little adventure game through a wild vaporwave feverdream of a world. The mixture of 3D-environments and the heavily stylized anime-style characters makes for a wild mixture that can feel jarring at first but contrarily, immediately caught my eye.
You play as Lady Love Dies, the investigation freak, member of a cabal of immortals who dwell in a pocket dimension and work to resurrect dead gods from beyond space and time. You're guessing right, the story is gonna get weird. The story establishes your position well by LD having been in exile for 3 million days, so things have changed in the meantime although her familiarity with certain elements of the world sets a nice tone for your adventure in this world. But your exile wasn't ended for humanitarian reasons. Instead, there's been a murder most foul and the embodiment of justice itself calls upon you to find out who was responsible.
And this is pretty much where gameplay starts. Those who expect a point and click adventure are in for a strong surprise because ultimately, Paradise Killer is a first-person collectathon-platformer. You traverse the island, upgrade your movement and treasure finding abilities and generally snoop around for clues and other little doodads. Inbetween your scavenger hunt you talk to your suspects, walk to the next suspect and back to the first one to cross-reference and double-check every statement and testimony. The bright-red skeleton man said he and his taxi-driver wife have been to the beach a lot this past week. Better run over to her and ask if she can confirm. This can lead to the gameplay feeling somewhat tedious, but the story is so genuinely well written and features some twists and turns that kept me hooked till the very end. Some beats really made me pause the game and tell other people who had previously played it how exasperated I was at finding out this or that new development.
The dialogues are interspersed by bits of voice acting that were nice, but repeated a little often for my tastes. Characters have a certain amount of lines that they can draw from and while they do a good job at conveying the current emotion, when it started to repeat itself, I briefly thought about turning it off. The same cannot be said for the game's soundtrack, however. While walking around the island the game is set on, you find music tapes that expand the number of tracks you can listen to while snooping around, but even if you just listen to the tracks assigned to the different areas of the island, everything felt extremely fitting to the vaporwave-aesthetic of the weird mythology of the setting.

I would wholeheartedly recommend Paradise Killer to everybody who puts story over gameplay. To those who feel like a game should never be primarily about reading, the game probably overstays its welcome by a good margin, seeing as my single playthrough took me roughly ten hours. To those on the fence, I'd recommend checking out the first bits of someone else's playthrough and then ask themselves whether they're intrigued by the mysteries presented.
This ain't your grandparents' Sherlock Holmes, but if you give it a chance, you will find a compelling crime story like none I've seen before!

A synthwave overdose dressed as a neo-noir detective thriller with a larger than life cast of cardboard cutouts, now in mighty 3D!
An acquaintance of mine here on the Steam cyberspace kindly gifted me this game on an inkling that I would enjoy it, and enjoy it I did, demonic goat waifu and all!
Paradise Killer takes place in a weird liminal city that used to be an afterlife of sorts in a really complex hierarchy of gods, demi-gods and mortals grinding on in perpetuity trying to reach the final and most perfect paradise. In this blissful place a horrific murderspree have been committed and it is up to the player as Lady Love Dies, an exiled investigator, to get to the bottom of the mystery and frame the guilty of this heinous act before moving on the the 25th Paradise.
All in all this is at its core a grand mixture of novel existentialism, a cyberpunkish detective visual novel story and a 3D parkour collect-a thon, all set in the backdrop of a 80s/90s mishmash of psychedelic glampunk aesthetics and quasi-japanese culture. The weird thing is that all the components work brilliantly and bring together a great sense of exploration of a largely abandoned world with a few colorful individuals still lingering. During your explorations you gain access to a few limited move-techs that let you explore new and farther places making the collection feel organic and not at all forced. You also get to hang out with a lesser demonic entity that brings in snippets of lore that knits the world together neatly in small easily digested portions.
The detective game is really hands-on with you gathering the clues with your laptop while interrogating the suspects on everything from their whereabouts to their backstory. A good thing with letting the player be a former exile is that you get to experience great worldbuilding as you investigate and interview the NPCs. I really like the quirky characters you encounter even if a few of them started to get on my nerves after a few harsh interrogations.. The more you hang out with the NPCs the more you get to know them, and subsequently the more information you can mine from them. A mechanic that worked but felt rather arbitrary in my travels back and forth to “level up” my comradeship with the persons I was investigating..
What really worked wonders for me was the sensation of exploring the abandoned world looking for clues as well as the general atmosphere it conjured. This setting is a perfect example of the vaporwave nostalgia of a time and place so awesome and funky that real life could never live up to its mythology, something that in a way resonates with a funky afterlife crumbling in its final hours.. At its heart it is a pastel psychedelic fever dream of a place that has never existed in real life and I love it!
Verdict
In the end Paradise Killer is a solid recommendation if you are into neon-noir detective stories with a slight case of exploration. This game has quite a lot of running around talking to NPCs so you better be one that likes to read stories to get the finer details of the case right. In the end however, it is up to you to present the final verdict and pass judgement on your former peers.

Criminally brilliant oddity of a game that is both visually and audibly stunning.
Who could have guessed that running around in circles would make such a captivating experience?

Dense, well written, and just straight up weird. For the first hour I had no clue what was going on setting wise. By the end of the game I decided that it's one of the most interesting worlds I've ever played in. My advice: look everywhere, interact with everything, collect as much as you can, push every conversation as far as possible. You'll be surprised by how much a dying world can have in it, how many stories you're told, and how absolutely deranged some of these clues' hiding places are.
The lite platforming can be frustrating sometimes. The map is complicated and hard to navigate. Talking to some of these people feels like being put in a saw trap. If you can learn to enjoy the friction, take it as intentional, everything starts making sense. Looking forward to more from this team in whatever form it takes.

Heeeesitant recommend. If you go for it, do so on sale.
Psychedelic vaporwave walking simulator with good tunes, vibing and collectibles first, investigation second. I completed almost everything, didn't bother getting every collectible. Reason why I got most of them, is explained in negatives.
+ Pretty uniquely themed
+ Looks good
+ Rather good music (saves the game)
+ Funny, at times
+ Lore building, while in a nonsensical setting, is consistent
* The only minigame is passable, nothing crazy bad/good
* Investigation struck me as amateurish/nonsensical, which partly makes sense considering the theming, but in the end it did not deliver for me personally
- More or less entire game is combo of fetch quest or walking around collecting items, with occasional dialogue
- Movement upgrades exist, but are hidden in the world and there's no tell where, I missed one of them untill I looked it up after beating the game. On the plus side, you don't need them to achieve an ending at least. They also trivialize certain things like locked gates in some places, since you can skip the "puzzle" of finding the button to press to open it
- Permanently missable items (though I THINK they don't mess with the endings)
- Weird design choices at times, where player's time gets wasted for the sake of being "artsy", example being...
- ...fast travel costs non-renewable resource, if you spend too much you might not be able to get stuff you care about. At least it's unlikely this will happen, I believe you can fast travel about 50-ish times total before getting punished. Not that you'd have a way of knowing that
- Very unclear, I believe deliberately, what gives clues/progress, it could be certain dialogue, it could be collecting things untill you have X, could be fetch quest 6... you never know, which is why I ended up collecting almost everything
- Lite puzzles in the game world while walking are kinda bad, but at least they don't take a lot of time
I didn't really feel like I was investigating as much as I was collecting random items everywhere, though once I was mostly done with that, I was able to focus a bit more on trying to follow the plot accurately. Although I'm pretty sure you could wait untill the final trial and then just go from there with a couple of save scums at worst, even if you didn't pay much attention.
Overall I occasionally enjoyed it, enough to finish it, but that was thanks to the good tunes. I wouldn't suggest going for it unless on sale and you have a clear idea of the type of game that it is... which is "art first, game second".

Very fun, if slightly absurd, detective game with solid mechanics, lots of collectables and funky worldbuilding. May you reach the moon.

Cool, but not quite what I was looking for.
In a nutshell:
- great aesthetic (the music very cool, unexpectedly, because not my style)
- very open island island to explore
- thick plot which completely unravels at the end
- unique characters
There were some things that ultimately failed, in my view:
(1) the openness of the island is cool, but it is filled to the brim with meaningless collectables, only a small portion of which are relevant to the story; I actually spend the first five hours of the game doing nothing but following these shiny breadcrumbs before engaging with the story line and characters. The first two hours were satisfying, by the fifth it got extremely dull. Evidence-wise, the game devolves into finding many needles in a haystack. Eventually, you get an "upgrade" which makes it easy by showing an icon overlaid on the screen of their positions. This also feels like a cop-out. But, anyway, it's not really guided by evidence, it's all "just there" from the beginning, spread all over the place. Unsatisfying.
(2) none of the deduction and putting the facts together happens in your head, the player's. It's all just in the screen. You don't need to think, you just need to collect everything, pick every dialogue option, and the case will solve itself.
This, in my opinion, is the game's biggest failure - because I am explicitly looking for games that do it differently.
Still, the game has a lot of character and, despite some unsatisfying choices, I enjoyed it. Not as good as I had hoped, but still worth playing, if it seems up your alley.