“When love dies, all that’s left are the facts.”
I’ve been thinking about Paradise Killer, the latest game from Kaizen Game Works and publisher Fellow Traveller, a lot since I finished it a couple weeks ago. It’s part of a bevy of games I’ve played (or am playing) recently that really nail the sense that you are moving through a lived-in world, that there is history here, that the story is not just plastered over the surface like a thin coat of paint.
The thing is, it’s a complicated game to talk about, right? It’s kind of purposely inscrutable. The aesthetics alone are baffling – and we could probably just stay here all day talking about aesthetics – but they’re just a veneer for a bunch of interlocking stories of power and privilege. Jeremy Signor did a great job of connecting the dots between the world in the game and our own, but even that is just a facet of the game. How do you make a game that narratively encompasses the chaos of 2020 – or the last half-decade, we’ll be generous – without absolutely obliterating players?
Make it a locked-door murder mystery, I guess.
At its core the thing that drives Paradise Killer is the same thing you get from a particularly compelling Agatha Christie novel, or any of the dozens and hundreds of properties inspired by her and/or play in the murder mystery space. Hell, you could even call this game “Vaporwave Clue” and you wouldn’t be inaccurate, per se. Paradise Killer is And Then There Were None is Murder on the Orient Express is Knives Out, and Lady Love Dies, our player-character, the investigation freak, is Hercule Poirot is Miss Marple is Benoit Blanc.
(Side note: holy fucking shit did I not know what the original title of And Then There Were None was, what the fuck, Agatha Christie.)
Paradise Killer asks you to do two things: interview and investigate. You are given a map, a list of suspects, and a basic timeline of events as the “official report” tells it. Then Judge, the literal embodiment of justice on Paradise Island Sequence 24, basically pats you on the back and says “go get em, tiger.” You are left to your own devices, and you have functionally as long as you want to solve the multiple mysteries on the island.
See, while it’s a big island, it’s functionally empty aside from the few members of the death cult called the Syndicate that remain. While the Syndicate captures and enslaves regular people to toil for them, these Citizens’ main purpose is to serve as psychic and hematic fodder for the gods, and the mass bloodletting has already occurred. So, there’s nobody here. You are free to be the investigation freak you always have been.
Almost immediately, though, you’re met with a big existential question as the player: why am I investigating the death of the Council, including Leader Monserrat, the man who exiled Lady Love Dies for a crime she was a victim of as well? Why would she give two shits if the Council, the highest echelon of this luxuriant death cult bent on ripping a hole in the fabric of reality and bringing dead gods back, is dead?
Here’s the reason.
Are you ready?
Everyone in this goddamn game is extremely horny for work.
They’re also horny for each other, to be perfectly clear. (In my playthrough it is implied that I slept with exactly two of the suspects, and weirdly, those two are the ones who got away from the endgame trials completely unscathed.) But that is a distant second for the near-sexual passion they bring to their extremely boring jobs. I suppose I could call it “religious devotion” but that’s honestly only true for the guy who paints himself in runes and calls everyone else heretics. All the folks on this island are ready to fuck…ing work, including Lady Love Dies, but nobody seems particularly ready to bring the gods back, which is, as I have mentioned, the Syndicate’s whole genocidal purpose.
In an earlier draft of this review I had a bunch of unformed but fancy words about the nature of power and its corrupting influence on the revolutionary projects of those who claim to be able to reach utopia. Instead I think it’s a lot more poignant to kind of just let the poster children for David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs do their own talking. Just about everyone on the island (except, in my playthrough, the Scottish himbo doctor and the goat woman) colludes to murder the Council either to try and gain more power, or hold onto the power they already have. Those without power are at best ignored (like all the ghosts you find) and at worst demeaned into the ground and sentenced to death in a kangaroo court (Henry Division).
Donald Trump, in response to the New York Times releasing his tax information on Sunday, said, in part: “The IRS treats me terribly.” He’s referring to a multi-year audit and court battle over a nearly-$80 million tax refund he got a few years ago. The fact he hasn’t been fined or imprisoned for tax evasion, and that his creditors (to whom he owes almost $420 million) haven’t yet swooped in and taken everything dear to him, isn’t really that surprising. And I don’t really expect anything to come of the latest (to be very clear, bombshell) releases from the Times.
For me, what really gets me fucked up is how fast you or I would be ruined by the federal government for doing anything approximating Trump’s actions. We simply don’t have the money, leverage, power or influence to pull that fucking stunt off, and we evidently pay on average tens of thousands of dollars more in taxes a year than Trump does. The gulf between those in power and the rest of us is insurmountable, and thus, it’s really not any wonder why Paradise Killer seems so strangely familiar.
To quote Jeremy’s article:
The limits of Paradise Killer is that you’re seeing the world through the eyes of an elite, but that’s also its strength. The banality through which the upper class sees the lower is an eye-opening realization to have, and the more the game treats an obviously monstrous system as just the way things are, as the world working as it’s intended, the more we can recognize our own world in the carnage.
From the beginning to the end, Lady Love Dies is not here to dismantle the system the Syndicate and the Council have dreamed up. She is an agent of the status quo, a genocidal, deeply fucked status quo, and she does her job with aplomb. She finds the interlocked conspiracies, uncovers the real murder weapons, and brings the perpetrators to justice. Once she’s done, she gets to go to Perfect 25, the island that won’t become overrun with demonic corruption (at the sacrifice of its Citizenry, yet again) and she’ll even get her old investigative unit back. Whatever the Syndicate does to try and revive its old dead gods, whatever atrocities it commits in the name of perfection, she will soon find herself once again a willing participant in that world. But first, she must “restore order.”
How many political figures have we been called to rally behind to “#resist?” How many Comeys and Muellers have galaxy-brained centrists told us to believe in? Oh, we just have to wait for Comey’s testimony. Oh, we just have to wait for Mueller’s report. Congress will impeach Trump. Biden will beat him in the election. Our Supreme Court will parse and administer the results fairly. Everywhere we look, we’re inundated with pleas to continue to support the clearly poisoned status quo. Movements are hamstrung and their energies redirected to people and politics that are actively antithetical to those movements and the existence of the people who make them up. The only justice you can give in Paradise Killer is the bullet, but that’s more than we get now. It’s maybe the most unrealistic thing in the game.
When we said “build a better world in the shell of the old,” this is not what we meant.
Time to breathe life back into paradise.
Paradise Killer is available on the Nintendo Switch and Steam.
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