Paradise Killer

I finished this game in 2 days, forgoing trivialities like "food" and "sleep."

There is a LOT more platforming than you would expect from the description. I usually get motion sickness but the accessibility controls were good enough that it wasn't an issue too much when I was playing, so I wanted to give that a shout out.

I finished the game three days ago and have thought about it constantly. It is hard to believe that at some point I considered stopping playing it. So my advice is this: if you ever feel stuck, keep exploring, keep thinking, don’t look for external help. The game gives you everything you need. This is perfect design, perfect writing. You will be rewarded immensely.
This is why we love indies. Simple gameplay, limited resources, and yet a fiercely smart, stylish, entertaining, and, if you interpret it as I think it was intended, heartbreaking experience. Could not recommend it more.

At a certain point the game feels like the equivalent of a mom coming home to find the entire house wrecked, and all the kids denying it & shifting blame to each other.

Overall Impression: C-. I give this game a cautious recommendation. This game is a prime example of style over substance. The music is good. The characters you meet and the island you explore are unique, strange, and oddly inviting. The world building for the game is top notch. The 'murder mystery' aspects are not nearly as compelling.
This game should be labeled as a walking simulator and hidden object game more than a murder mystery. While talking to the various characters scattered around the island is needed, the real clues are tucked away in some pretty obscure areas of the island. You have to look in every nook and cranny to find items that are key to figuring out what happened on the island. Without one particular 'power up,' it is implausible a player would find all they would need to unravel the mystery.
I enjoyed my time on Paradise Island, but I it felt like a vacation that dragged on a little too long and the events I had been looking forward to participating in while there were not quite as they had been billed to be.

I'm giving it a thumbs up but psa to everyone who gets motion sick easily,, this game will test you. I sadly cannot physically finish it

Conceptually, Paradise Killer is relatively simple - it's an open-world detective/mystery game, where you're set loose on an island to solve a mass murder. There's several gimmicks involved, perhaps most notably that you can start the trial whenever you see fit (there's even a speedrun achievement for completing the game in under 10 minutes, if you want to just make wild claims about who did it with literally zero evidence). In terms of the open world aspects playing into the mystery itself, I eventually came around by the end, but only relatively late as I made a discovery that would actually have been reasonably easy to overlook that completely recontextualized the murders and blew the case open. Most of the time it feels vaguely superfluous to have this open space since a majority of the investigation is talking to people and finding some items that often are effectively signposted to you, but if you're putting in the legwork it starts to become easier to appreciate on that level.

That said, the open world was excellent for setting up the game's biggest strength, which is a combination of immaculate vibes and incredible weirdness. Paradise Killer is set in a universe where cosmic gods and demons are real, have directly intervened in humanity's affairs, and the island you're on is actually one of a series of islands created outside of reality by the members of an immortal cult worshiping to try to bring their chosen gods back to power. There's weird cult statues all over, the islands end with a mass ritual slaughter of all of the non-cult slave class, one of the suspects is crippled by debilitating trauma from being able to hear people's psychic death screams, and there's even notes of a plan to try to destroy the moon with a railgun before the god slumbering on the far side can absorb enough lunar power to scorch the Earth clean. All this is under the surface of this clean, peppy vaporwave aesthetic and soundtrack and it's just kind of trip to run around finding collectibles to learn more about this setting before you solve the relatively-simple-if-you're-thorough murder conspiracy.

Paradise Killer ends up being worth it because the settings and vibes are just so unique and weird, so if you can get onboard with those, it's a worthwhile experience.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I enjoyed this game more than I expected. I definitely didn't go in expecting to hate it or anything, but I expected it to be just another murder mystery visual novel game with some exploring elements. At it's core that is what it was, but it is also so much more.
You can tell a lot of thought and love was put into this game. The devs decided to put their effort into making the game unique and stylized instead of aiming for extreme realism in the graphics, and it works well. The sound effects, the music, the menus, it all plays into the vaporwave aesthetic. The characters all suck in the best ways, there is so much to uncover about all of them to a point where it can be overwhelming but the game does a good job of letting you know when there are still things you're missing and nudging you in the right direction without being too handholdy.
There are quite a lot of collectibles, and you will have to do some platforming to get them all, but there are upgrades you can get throughout the map that help a lot and as someone who does not particularly like platforming, I found it pretty easy. I perfected the game in 15 hours, although at least a couple of those were me accidentally leaving the game open so it was probably more like 13.
My only negatives are 1. that the game does not auto save and you need to go to save points to manually save, which does make sense for the game/aesthetic but I find annoying anyways lmao, and then 2. the notes automatically saved in the case files can sometimes be missing some key info that helps build a picture of what happened, things that I only remembered because I noted them in my head. Not a huge deal, because you can still figure it out without those small details, just something to keep in mind going in.
Overall a very very fun and unique game with a world that I would love to potentially return to some day.