There's no easy way to start a review on Paratopic, so lets just get into this: this game is weird, this game is cheap, this game is short, and you should absolutely play it. Paratopic follows 3 characters in a Half-Life styled, nearly dystopian world, although you more than likely won't even realize you play as 3 characters until you are deep within the game. The style isn't the only Half-Life aspect to this game: you are rooted strictly in first person the entire time, with a similar FOV and feel to Half-Life, although I'm not sure I could explicitly explain why. The game follows an unnamed killer, a smuggler, and a hiker in three different threads that intertwine, all revolving around a destroyed electrical facility, possible aliens, and VHS tapes that have become an addictive drug to much of the populace. The reason you might not know who you are playing as for most of the game is because of the game's smart use of cuts, a very filmic tool that cuts between scenes and characters in a quick, disorienting way. Basically, it's like a level transition without so much as a black screen. One second you will be receiving instructions as to what your mission is while staring out the window of a diner, and the next will be a cut to a diner booth where you are getting instructions on a job smuggling tapes across the boarder. This cut, in particular, both contains a hint that you are playing as multiple characters (you can see someone in the booth you will cut to from the window) and a reason for you to think you aren't (you are both in the same diner, and at the same time, so it could be misconstrued as a time jump). That said, if you are a keen player, you may notice the soundtrack changes when your character changes most of the time. The game is capital "W" Weird, but it's also a game that respects your intelligence, dripping informative puzzle pieces without explicitly telling you too much. As to why all this is happening, you'll have to judge for yourself as the game is scant on answers, but I can give you my theories.
Spoilers from here on out. I highly recommend you play the game before reading further.
You start the game at the border, having been incarcerated by border control for smuggling tapes. This conversation with the border control agent does not go well, before cutting to a diner, where you are now the assassin, getting your orders to kill a distributor of tapes. You don't know who you work for, but they sound incredibly scummy if this conversation is anything to go by. You may even be addicted to the tapes, since the language here sounds like you are strung out and it's your dealer using your need for his own gain, but I may be misreading this here (even after two playthroughs, there is quite a few questions that I can't answer). At another booth nearby is someone working for the tape distributors who own this diner, and they task you with smuggling tapes across the border. This takes place before the first scene, which means you are eventually caught. The game cuts to your apartment as the smuggler, and you check on the suitcase full of tapes given to you to smuggle. Your neighbor tries to convince you to give her a tape, because she is jonesing for another after the last you gave her. If you give one to her, you can watch her watching it, which ends in her head ripping open. There is a cut, and you are driving the tapes down the road to the boarder, until cutting again to a convenience store where you can have a conversation about the electrical company whose plant blew up 14 years earlier, and the clerk's opinion that aliens are behind it. Up to this point, there have been several instances where aliens can actually be seen walking around. You may think that this was an impressionist thing, where they put humanoid, undetailed models so as not to distract you, or to imply your character is unconcerned with them. After the next cut, you are a hiker walking through the woods taking pictures of birds and making your way between the old electrical power plant and a place affectionately called the concrete mansion. You pass a no trespassing sign and are gutted by an alien.
The three plots go in very different directions. Linearly, the first event is the hiker and her death. The assassin, then, finds her out in the woods and takes her camera (the one part of this story I cannot figure out is why the assassin is out in the woods in the first place). Afterwards, the assassin is at the diner where and while the smuggler is getting their job. The assassin then loads her gun and kicks down the back door and shoots the man back there. She then watches several of the tapes lying all over the place, and that's the last we hear of her (I'd imagine she died). As the smuggler, you drive down to the boarder and you interact with the convenience store clerk learning backstory to this world. Finally, you are caught at the boarder and the boarder agent is subsequently killed after watching the tapes, and we linger on a final shot from the perspective of the dead hiker's camera in the woods, while a surveillance camera turns to film her dead body.
So here is my theory. The tapes are a commentary on media consumption, where everyone is addicted to media in a world where media is scarce and dangerous, and thus a commodity of the black market. They are a danger to the populace because they are lethal when over exposed to them. These systems of dystopia started with the destruction of the electrical plant, which is implied to have happened because they where attempting to contact aliens, and where then invaded. The tapes themselves, a theory I have due to that final shot of the game, are the CCTV feeds of the aliens at the electrical plant. These aliens aren't acknowledged throughout (two sit at the bar in the diner), except by the clerk who plainly believes in them (although does not, ironically, notice the man he is pointing out is indeed an alien). Even your character, when confronted about a man filling up her car, does not seem to know what the clerk is talking about when the odd figure is pointed out, barely illuminated by the gas station fluorescents. The aliens seem to have a purpose, perhaps in either observance or outright hostility and subjugation, but the game never really takes more than a glance in that direction.
The themes are odd, and potentially impenetrable to a satisfying degree. The game doesn't make a concise point on media, on speculation about the absurd and horrific, or on potential gender themes which felt flirted with on one or two occasions. What it does is create a puzzle, a series of questions with a few gears and belts, but not quite the schematic of how it all goes together. It's an experiment of style, but style for a thematic purpose. It's a David Lynch game, essentially, with a distinct '98 vibe that wants to confound you and keep you thinking. And it is incredibly successful.
Be seeing you.
9.0
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