Find the ritualistic slaughter of the lower class shocking? That’s because you haven’t been paying attention.
We’ve seen a lot of anticapitalist work in recent years. Whether it’s The Outer Worlds’ skewering of rampant corporatism or Disco Elysium’s embrace of communist ideals, creators are speaking out about what’s wrong with the world in ways games haven’t done in the past. But for all their pointed messaging, these games lack a certain amount of bravery in their choices. The Outer Worlds’ supposed satire becomes flaccid thanks to its tendency to equate sides in its big choices. And Disco Elysium gives itself an out by only making playing as a communist an option where being a fascist is also one, however much the game chastises you for it. That’s why Paradise Killer, which has anticapitalist messaging baked right into its worldbuilding, is such a refreshing change of pace. It unapologetically shows you a world of horror, one where the lower class is literally sacrificed for the upper one, until you realize it’s holding up a mirror to the world we know.
Paradise Killer takes place in our world, but another reality. A group billing themselves the Syndicate hastaken on a project with two goals: create a perfect alternate reality through psychic architecture and revive a set of alien gods through prayer and ritualistic sacrifice. These goals dovetail into a class system that’s completely fabricated by the Syndicate: In order to fill out the lower class, they kidnap people from the “real” world and populate their alternate reality – which takes the form of an island – with these kidnapped regular people, putting them to work in a factory then ritualistically sacrificing them all as the Syndicate moves on to a new island. This is all done in the name of using the psychic energy release via worship and slaughter to resurrect the alien gods that the Syndicate worships.
It’s easy to see the parallels developer Kaizen Game Works are going for here, and easier still to recognize in 2020. We live in a world eager to sacrifice the 99% to keep the mythical economy afloat. The ruling class was and is all too eager to watch people die of COVID-19 if it means keeping the money flowing to their pockets. While 200,000 people died in the United States, billionaires got hundreds of billions of dollars richer during the pandemic. It’s clear here that capitalism is its own religion, and the 99% are the ones being sacrificed to resurrect the old god that is the economy.
That the ruling class explicitly and exclusively benefits from this religion is also relevant. It’s not just a blind belief without motive. Policy is made to put money back into the pockets of the richest among us, and if they have to slaughter the lower class to do so? That’s just the way it is in capitalism. Belief in the system and knowingly benefiting from it aren’t mutually exclusive, either. In fact, it’s your fault for not being one of the elite, even though, quite notably, the elite are an exclusive club that’s self-sustaining, welcoming the already-privileged alone into its ranks. That you happen to be the ones who benefit most from capitalism doesn’t negate the fact that you truly believe in it. In truth, they fulfill each other.
The situation is much the same in Paradise Killer, and in fact is designed to make you see this. You play as Lady Love Dies, a member of the Syndicate and the so-called investigation freak as she’s called in to investigate the murder of the Council, the highest-ranking members of the Syndicate. The bulk of the island has already moved on to the next iteration of this reality, and the people who are left are all suspects, the vast majority of whom are members of the Syndicate. In your conversations with people, the lower class comes up only when talking about the slaughter and their existence in the factory. They only exist as what they can do for the ruling class. Also, no one you question even questions this aspect of their cult as being morally reprehensible or anything like that. It’s just the way it is.
What’s maddening is how banal these reactions are even to Lady Love Dies. Though you have the option to say that it’s wrong here and there in dialog choices, you and the other members of the Syndicate continually gloss over the morality of slaughtering an entire stratum of the population. In fact, it’s seen as inherently morally just in service to the gods. At first, it all seems very over-the-top until you stop and think about how capitalism treats labor. The rich exist to get richer off the backs of the lower classes, andwill continue to crow about capitalism’s virtues. And why not? In this way, capitalism is working exactly as intended, even going so far as becoming a morality system for the ultra-wealthy. In a better reality, this would be seen as exactly as monstrous as the Syndicate’s ritualistic slaughter of the lower class without any need for prodding. But the elites’ conviction obfuscates this reality. In fact, their firm belief in this system often makes their status an aspirational goal for many in the lower class that they’ll never have a chance to meet, thereby hiding from them how fucked we all truly are.
If there’s one fault in how Paradise Killer portrays a parallel world to one run by capitalism, it’s that it doesn’t offer a way forward. The entire point of the game is to solve the mystery of the Council’s murder, but in that time, the plight of the lower class is never so much as touched. Only one ordinary person, a demon-possessed man named Henry Division, is ever interacted with, and even then, he’s only ever talked about as an object or weapon, never as a real person. The motives of the suspects are all very much the usual court intrigue you’d find in most fictional governmental bodies. The fate of the kidnapped citizens, however, is set in stone and never questioned. The limits of where the game deals with capitalism’s effects start and end with the background of the world. It never really goes farther than that, which is a bit disappointing given how vividly the game renders the horrors of capitalism.
Still, maybe that’s the point. Maybe the usual idea that one person can make a difference in the face of monstrosity is too naïve. We’re not going to be saved by one of the elites growing a conscience. We can only conquer this beast through collective action. We see hints of that with the ghost of a citizen that we help known as the Anarchic Ghost, who has been advocating for collective action, but they’re portrayed as a lone voice in the desert who wasn’t successful in organizing the lower class. But again, the concerns of the citizens are glossed over in favor of the privileged. 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.
Thank you to Jeremy Signor for contributing this piece on Paradise Killer and its parallels with our society! He’s our second (PAID!) contributor, and his contribution was made possible by you, our lovely readers! Come back later this weekend for the Paradise Killer review!
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