Paradise Killer

2026-07-12
Paradise Killer bangs, slaps, fucks. But it fucks like that polyamorous, gamer, art-school couple who makes you uncomfortable and uses words like "sensual" and "ethical non-monogamy". Paradise Killer almost scared me off in the same way with its seemingly overwrought writing and world-building where everyone has a name like Witness to the End and Doctor Doom Jazz. Dickhead Jazz's character design especially made me want to run for the hills. Instead of looking like Doctor Doom (cool) or a jazz player (cool) he looks like a pink-mohawked robot-armed white boy in a jacket with no sleeves and no shirt underneath (twat). Fuuuck off.

But it grew on me. A lot.

The process started with the unconscious foot tapping to the soundtrack, a pastiche of dance, vaporwave, funk and funky pop that flirts with Persona 5. Hell, visually it's flirting with Persona 5 too, all bright saturated colors, neon sprayed everywhere, and a UI that somehow makes you feel cooler for playing the game. I still feel like a cock when Doctor Doom Jizz pops up on my Steam Deck on this plane--but I'm feeling better.

Foot-tapping leads into button-tapping as I hit the meat of the game: first person platforming. We're here to solve a murda mystery and we need evidence and the only way to do that is to jump around Kaizen Game Works' sprawling and highly vertical map of Paradise 25. We jump to talk to the eclectic mix of weirdos and we jump to gather evidence and currency to buy movement-enhancing abilities and bribe said weirdos for more evidence.

I love first person platforming--a replay of Half-Life unearthed that dormant truth--but here it's just fiddly enough to be shy of satisfying. Too floaty, building momentum is too slow. Precise jumps don't exist. Sprint, jump, and go with god.

It doesn't help that the world itself feels too large. Or you move too slow. Because you will be doing loops of this paradise. Ask person A about person B then go to person B who tells you to talk to person C and round and round we go. But hey at least there's fast travel. But it costs a finite currency because get fucked, right? Genuinely baffling. Devil's advocate: it forces you to explore the world. But what's left to explore besides the menagerie of freaks is a mostly empty city filled with collectibles.

And why are there so many fucking collectibles? Didn't I just fucking write this same sentence in another review? [Checks back on Backloggd.] Yeah I fucking did. In a god damned Indiana Jones game of all things. Here the answer is: cause actually Kaizen Game Works' forte is open-world collectathon games. Promise Mascot Agency is the same deal only the map clearing is smoother because you're in a car. That can fly. But smoother cuts both ways: when the car does everything, the map basically clears itself. Here you're stuck in a lady wearing a cool scarf and you have to actually pilot her--reading the terrain, chaining jumps, sniffing out the little shortcuts that turn a slog of a loop into a lap. Neither game solves the fact that it's mostly going back and forth. Promise Mascot's answer is to let you skip it. Paradise Killer's is to make the back-and-forth the game.

At this point you're thinking, for a 4-star review it sounds like you're describing a dog turd someone placed in your mailbox. But Paradise Killer is another one of those "greater than the sum of its parts" games like Fantasy Life. The loop of hop-hop-hopping across the map, especially after you get the double jump and warp, to pick up every little piece of trash you find, on the way to track down the next lead, or build up the relationship with Zany Named Lady #3, or buy a soda can or, or, or. As much as my raison d'être is mechanically complex games it is also games that let me do what I want. And sometimes what I want to do is to turn my brain off and do some fucking first person platforming.

Importantly the mystery that sits at the center, that all of these myriad "little tasks" revolve around, starts as an actual intriguing head scratcher. There's a foundation of lore and relationships to suss out. Then there's the actual mechanics of how locks and doors were bypassed and how people were killed. Maybe the coolest part is the open world design actually enabling you to uncover or not uncover genuinely pivotal bits of evidence that can completely upend your understanding of the case. In fact the only way to get the speedrun achievement is to show up to the trial with NO evidence and basically go "Uhhhh that guy did it, Judge." And the judge saying "What? No. Not Guilty. Trial over. Get the fuck off the island." We love a mystery game that lets you properly shit the bed.

Shame then that it ends with the heavily anticipated "Trial" portion being a perfunctory set of multiple choice questions you basically can't get wrong if you gathered the proper evidence. It's a bit of a squeaker slipping out of the bottom of Paradise Killer's shorts at the end.

And yet all I can remember is enjoying my time poodling around Paradise 25, always with another mystery to unravel. Or collectible to hoover up. Or lore tidbit to immediately dismiss--I stopped reading those after the first 20 told me: So-And-So the clown god, born of a meteor shower, made a labyrinth in France and was deposed during the Great Disrespectening and turned into a giant statue of a dog that is eternally damned to be peed on by smaller, normal-sized dogs. All the while begrudgingly coming to kind of like these bafflingly-named neon-colored immortal tools.

I've said my piece. I really must be going. My girlfriend heard me say "ethical non-monogamy" from the other room and now is asking if it's related to why I dyed my hair pink.