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 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.

Wow, this game.
Paradise Killer is a deceptively ambitious, aesthetically visionary game that, on the surface, seems like it should not really 'work.' As another Steam review says, "embrace the confusion." After a disorienting first hour, I was hooked.
You play as Lady Love Dies, an immortal investigator and disgraced member of "the Syndicate," a secretive demi-god-ish cult that lives on a synthetic island paradise in its own dimension, away from the 'real world.' Love Dies has been in exile for 3,000,000 days. She's called out of retirement following a bloodbath that wipes out much of the Syndicate's leadership. The island is on lockdown. It's up to you to find out what happened and present evidence at a grand endgame trial.
"Collectathon" has a grain of truth but really does the game a disservice, as a label. You're dropped into a fascinating island with no restrictions and the game truly does not care where you go, how you try to navigate, or where & if you can get on or around anything. You can purchase three movement/navigation upgrades, tips from a black market 'information vendor,' and also 'hacking upgrades' to your trusty laptop, Starlight. You will need to be able to break 20 or so electronic locks throughout the world to find some of the juiciest evidence.
Fans will warn you: Paradise Killer is not a traditional sleuthing experience. Starlight has a clear interface that catalogs information: testimony, alibis, and so on. The 'police procedure' is baked in. The player explores & analyzes the physical environment. You're in charge of ferreting out new secrets that complicate competing theories of what happened. You're also in charge of who to go after and how to 'wield' the evidence.
One small nitpick: it is impossible to 'say the wrong thing' in Paradise Killer. This mostly fits with the game's worldbuilding - the lockdown, the pseudo-immortality and ingrained arrogance of the suspects - but it still feels strange and slightly off to me that you can't jeopardize your investigation by botching a line of questioning, or by making enemies.
Overall? An indie triumph with heart, depth, vision, and style. Great vaporwave soundtrack. Cool explorable world. Fascinatingly bizarre characters. Walks a tight-rope between absurd and thought-provoking. More than meets the eye, and greater than the sum of its parts.

Started out confused and frustrated. Understood nothing. Then somehow time just slipped by while I was playing.
Embrace the confusion.
Incredible game.