Yes Spoiler: Paradise Killer and the Unbiased Investigator
There is a short story by Brazilian writer Luis Fernando Veríssimo in which he talks about a then-recent experiment in which spiders were brought to space to see if they could weave their web, and he imagines what it would be like if a writer was brought to space to see if they could write. The writer does not compare favorably. The ongoing gag is that the writer keeps finds way to put off their assignment of writing five pages on spiders on space, and even when it feels like they're about to begin they say "first, a few considerations on form".
Yes Spoiler is the name of what you might call a column of sorts. It's a signifier that I'm talking about games in a specific way. But first, a few considerations on form.
On my first newsletter, I talked about several games, with a connecting thread between them. On my second one, I talked about a single game, but not about the game in a whole; rather, about the effect of a single implementation of a single mechanic within a single playthrough of the game. Neither of these could be confused with a review.
This newsletter will be about a single game on its entirely, so it could be confused with a review. I don't want it to be confused, so I've come up with a name for my non-reviews: Yes Spoiler. This is, as you might surmise, the opposite of No Spoiler.
There has been lately a commodification of art; well, it has always existed, but the idea that art is but a product has grown to become a basic, often unchallenged assumption. This is specially strong in the field of digital games, where the line between this nascent artform and technological bricabracs has always been tenuous. It's not like this feeling doesn't exist in books, but few people would claim a 2020 book is better than a 2015 book because its lines are better printed. This assumption, I feel, poisons the entire well of game discussion, since it presumes the basic form of discussion is "no spoiler", do not reveal details about a game plot in case the reader hasn't played it yet.
Now, I'm not going to take a hardcore position and say no one should care about spoilers. They can certainly change the way you experimence a work in a way you like it less. However, since "no spoiler" assumes the reader hasn't played the game in question, it forces discussion to take form of the sole literary form designed to analyze works for people who haven't enjoyed them: the consumer report. There is a reason why Angry Videogame Nerd style videos usually call themselves 'reviews', even though there is no reason to review a game that came out 25 years ago and sold six hundred units since then as if it was a hot new product.
I intend my column to be an antidote of sorts to this thinking. I don't review games, I analyze them. This means I will spoil as much as I need to, as I'll assume you've either played the game or are interested in what I have to say about it regardless.
Now that I'm done with my preamble... which itself had a preamble... let's move on. The space spiders are already working on their webs, and today they've got an intricate one.
Paradise Killer is a hard game to describe, but I’d begin with a single word: unique.
Nearly everything this game does, it does in a way that’s never been done before. It’s a mystery game in which you gather clues and talk to suspects, but rather than fit this in a linear and dour adventure-style game (or wedge it inside the folds of a more popular game, like, say, Murdered: Soul Suspect) it’s the main course amongst a peculiar salad of exploration. (This already wins me over – I believe the walking simulator with well-defined goals to be the ultimate form of videogames.) And rather than basing this mystery on a known world, or on known clichés at least, it shows a bizarre world in which you are the villains of a pulp horror cosmic novel, centuries after a victory so complete it offers no chance of reproach. Its peculiar worldbuilding is done confidently, without any exposition or outsider characters: you are thrown off a cliff and expected to pick up the pieces well enough and quickly enough to solve a murder. And it shows the paradise of this evil society, that kidnaps humans as servants and sacrifices (in that order), not as a dark hell or as decadent gothic, but as vaporwave. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and I’ve seen a lot of weird games.
But there is one specific thing I’d like to focus on: the investigation. One of the main points made in the game is that there are no rails to the investigation whatsoever. It works like this: your character, exiled sleuth Lady Love dies, is brought in to solve a (probable) murder. You can finish your investigation at any time, but it will be immediately brought to trial, and you will need to make your case. Advertisement for the game stated you can pin any crime on any suspect, and that’s kind of true: you can accuse anyone even without evidence, which just prompts a ‘wow, really?’ from the judge, and your input is ignored. A brilliant fact that helps this (and I feel is not often mentioned) is that, at the beginning, there already is an accused: pitiful Henry Division, the only character who is not one of the worshippers of the dead gods, but rather the child of the lowly servant caste made of kidnapped humans and their descendants. This accusation is an indispensable grease for the game to work: fail to provide sufficiently compelling evidence (…or, you know, any evidence at all) and the Judge assumes the original theory to be correct, and Henry hangs for the crime.
This might give one the misleading idea that this is merely a game that hides its rails well, and truly offers only one path. But that’s not the case. It's true that if you just go YOLO and accuse someone without evidence, the game just shrugs. But as long as you have SOME evidence, you can point fingers at any character and Lady Love Dies will spin a case for you. It might be not be enough to convince the judge, but it's enough that it doesn't feel like you're pressing the wrong buttons just to see the error messages.
However, our standards might be even higher than the judge's...
Shortly after the game's release, someone tweeted that it was quite the coincidence that the two romanceable characters were innocent. The devs retweet it with commentary. Oh yeah, isn't it a weird coincidence? The two people I've kissed happened to be the only ones I didn't accuse! Truly this is a game that offers total freedom! Except that people that played the game can tell that the tweet wasn't celebrating the way that player had chosen to play the game, but the actual solution to the mystery. Follow the clues to the end, accuse everyone with the proper evidence, and the two romanceable characters are the only ones to walk out.
In fact, immediately after the first time I finished the game, I came back and tried again, this time on a 'genocide run': I wanted to convict everyone. I posted about it to the game's official Discord afterwards. Someone responded: wait, how did you convict Doctor Doom Jazz?
Doctor Doom Jazz is one of the two romanceable characters, and the answer to that question is that I threw a bullshit charge at him that somehow stuck.
Let's talk about Doom Jazz. (I know you want to.) He was one of the first characters that I talked to when I started the game. (Please don't tell anyone that this is because I fell off the starting area, and he happens to live on a boat near the ground level.) He immediately seemed very suspicious to me. Sure, he was charming and confident, but that just made him a gender-bent femme fatale. When I pointed out his alibi didn't check out because his clinic's back door was faulty and not correctly logging passages, he basically waved me off. However, by the end of the game, as two concurrent conspiracies are revealed, it turns out his motives don't match either of them, he has no strings for anyone to pull, and, most importantly, he exudes pure, raw himbo energy, making him entirely unable to pull off any heist and keep its details hidden. His innocence shone.
That's not so much the case for the other romanceable character, goat-headed information broker and idol Crimson Acid. She definitively holds some blame. But under Paradise's justice, there are no half-measures: each person is either guilty of a crime and punished by death, or entirely innocent. Crimson Acid's assistance was crucial to one of the crimes, but the actual accusation points at someone else. (In fact, in my full conviction attempt, I found it easier to accuse her of a bogus charge I knew she was innocent of than to accuse her as the sole perpretrator of the crime she did assist with.)
Which leads us neatly to the person that will hang in her stead: Lydia Day Break, who happens to be Lady Love Dies' best friend. Actually, we should say people: Lydia's husband Sam, sexy bartender skeleton, will sit in the accuser's chair if you point fingers at his wife. They must be accused or aquitted as a couple; they won't let you take only one of them. And, in the conspiracy, Lydia certainly played a large part, even if she claims to be unaware of what she was doing.
The Day Breaks make for an interesting case. They are friends of the protagonist and beloved by the community. Most people openly state that, while they had a conviction for them, they will refuse to present the evidence at the trial, which doesn't harm the accusation of the other people involved. It's a neat ending. The guilty are still accused, patsy Henry Division gets to walk free (...for about two days, since humans are not allowed to move on to the next island and the present one is about to be destroyed) and your friends remain alive. That's the best ending, isn't it?
In my opinion, absolutely not.
See, after the trial is over, you are allowed to walk the island a little longer and talk to those who haven't been executed by Justice's hand. During this segment, you are given the power to kill or exile anyone in the island, in case you suspect them of participating in the crimes but couldn't prove it. However, doing so offers only canned dialogue. No special line is given for Love Dies to say, should she choose to deliver lighter justice to the couple. The only thing she'll say is "I couldn't prove it, but I know you're guilty."
I doubt she would let the Day Breaks walk if she had the evidence to do so. The game does not allow the slightest opening for thinking that she would do anything less than provide as much evidence as possible for anyone she believed to be guilty. If anyone lived past the trial, it's underscored that Love Dies either believes them to be innocent or failed to find enough evidence.
She's not called Lady Love Lives Well Even After A Crime Has Been Comitted!
Have whatever headcanon you desire: I cannot see Lady Love Dies doing half measures. If she has evidence to convict the Day Breaks, you can bet that she will. There is a special screen at the end of the game, if you do convict them. No such screen appears if you let them live.
But if I'm right about this, and the community is wrong... what else are they wrong about? It's one thing to be wrong about a character's impetus - specially a player character, whose actions are porous with the players'. As far as the actual crime goes, however, the community believes to have the facts right - we all know who did what, when and how. But if we're wrong about Love Dies' actions, why cant't we be wrong about objective, verifiable facts as well? After all, the trial doesn't actually show whether or not we're wrong - it just shows how convincing our argument has been. And accusing Doom Jazz will show you that the game will provide believable arguments for wrongful convictions. How do we know we are right?
My alarm went off, so it's time for another off-the-wall literature reference. One of my favourite short stories by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is An Examination on the Work of Herbert Quain, a detailed account of the bibligraphy of a fictional writer who had authored some quite unique books. His debut novel, The God of the Labyrinth, was generally considered a good, if formulaic, mystery story, but it held a secret: the detective had failed to solve the mystery correctly. The clues were there, though, and the reader could succeed where the hero had failed. I'd always thought this would be an interesting concept for a videogame, perhaps even more so than for a less interactive medium. In most cases, a character is merely an extension of the player's will upon the gameworld, and its idiosyncracies only turn up in case they enrich the player's experience. What if a character was limited in a way - through their own biases, or even though incompetence - and was unable to perceive the correct solution? What if there was no in-game way for players to be sure their deductions were right?
What if a game has already done that, and we never realized?
Paradise Killer would be the perfect game for it. It doesn't judge the players' conclusions by how correct they are; just by how strong their case is. And it wouldn't even need to be a deliberate effort: since it doesn't lead players to any conclusion, there would be no way to dispel a wrong consensus. What if this is what happened? How would we know? Would we treat the actual, intended resolution like a conspiracy theory?
This would not even be so difficult to happen. For a long time, theorists following weirdo YouTube series Don't Hug Me I'm Scared had a working theory, endossed by big names like MatPat of Game Theory, that the series was about the crescent commercialization of media for children in the UK, which resulted in said media being dumbed down to stop rattling the chains of executives. This theory was so prevalent that fans found it strange when the creators announced there would be a TV series of their work. Wait, didn't they say TV shows were bad? Why had they turned back on their word? Did they sell out? But it turns out, no, they never said TV shows were bad - it was just the most common interpretation. It was, in my opinion, very well founded, but it was just a well-founded theory. I used to believe in that, as well, until I found an alternative explanation that makes a lot more sense. If you do end up watching that, do take notice of how much airtime is spent assuring the viewer that it's not bad if they believe the theory that's being disproven here. It's not a personal attack. We do become married to what we believe, don't we?
We need Lady Love Dies to see what we had seen in order to solve the mystery of Paradise Killer. If she was blind to the truth, we cannot find it either. Maybe it is quite a coincidence, indeed, that the two romanceable characters are innocent.
If you'd like to publicly comment on this piece, you can do so on my personal blag.