We Love It's Guide to…
Smuggle contraband VHS tapes, drive through eerie night roads, and piece together a fragmented first-person horror story.
Released 06 Sep 2018
Smuggle VHS Tapes
Photograph a Rare Bird
Drive Through the Night
Smuggle contraband VHS tapes across the border. Discover the remnants of illicit industry. Prepare for an assassination. This is Paratopic, an atmospheric retro-3D horror adventure through a cursed fever dream.
Developed by Arbitrary Metric · Published by Serenity Forge
Paratopic is a first-person horror adventure that moves between the lives of three characters. You smuggle VHS tapes across a border, search a forest for a rare bird, and become involved in a planned killing.
Explore low-polygon environments, talk with unsettling characters, drive through the night, and take photographs. Some scenes include a gun, while much of the experience focuses on moving through places and observing what happens.
The story unfolds in short vignettes that shift between locations, characters, and points in time. Details in conversations and environments offer pieces of a larger mystery, leaving players to connect the fragments.
Players who enjoy Paratopic often point to its unsettling atmosphere, retro visuals, and sound design, as well as the appeal of piecing together its fragmented, ambiguous story. Some find that mystery memorable and worth revisiting; others feel the story is too unclear, the experience too short, or the long driving sections and sparse interactions make it drag.
"Paratopic is probably the most important first-person game this year."
Waypoint
You got caught smuggling VHS tapes across the border, and now there's hell to pay. You want to find an elusive rare bird in the forest and snap its picture. You have to kill a man in the back room of a shady diner.
This is Paratopic, an experimental first-person horror game named by Rock, Paper, Shotgun as one of the best games of 2018, and by FACT mag as having one of the top 10 soundtracks of the year.
A narrative, horror tinged adventure game that takes you on a journey through a cruel fever dream world.
Cutting between numerous detailed and varied vignettes, unravel how the stories of three separate characters intersect.
Explore the detritus of forbidden industry, kill, drive through the night, find yourself in conversation with some very off-kilter individuals.
A leisurely playthrough should take forty five minutes give or take, with plenty more to discover in the detailed, grimey low polygon environments. Or speedrun it, if you'd prefer.
Over an hour of gorgeous dark ambient music is used to create our subtly dynamic soundscape. An anachronistic blend of modern and outdated production as glitches and textural pads meet synthesis & sampling akin to a haunted recollection of 90s Unreal Engine soundtracks.
| Platforms | Windows, macOS, Linux |
|---|---|
| Achievements | 20 |
| Age ratings |
|
| Controller support | Xbox |
| Controller required | No |
| DLC / extras | 1 listed on Steam |
| Website | Official website |
