i'm kind of weird about indie games, while for a lot of people they can be a real bright spot in a fairly bleak industry, for me it's just difficult to get all that excited for them, reasons for that are plentiful, the fact i'm much less into 2D games, most of them do not get physical releases which is how i play my games and in *many* cases an overreliance on the teams own inspirations rather than any real attempt at making something their own, in general games that try to hard to lean into "thing but new!" or "thing but indie!" do less than nothing to me, games like your bomb rush cyberfunks, your sea of stars mcchained echoes or like, 90% of metroidvania roguelike whatevers that come out and in this sea it is rare i see a game that gets me genuinely excited to try it, paradise killer is one of those and i think it, in general, exemplifies what i think can work about indie projects while also being something wholley new and fresh, it has it's own influences as many of the indie games i don't care for do but it goes out of it's way to learn from them and do it's own thing with it.

the games main inspirations are grasshopper titles, mainly the more mainline kill the past games and flower, sun and rain in particular, it even directly references it with things like the "kill the thirst" drink you can find, but it doesn't just make a grasshopper game and call it a day, it takes these inspirations, things like naming conventions and some influence in things like the setting and it goes in its own direction( thankfully without being weird about women like many grasshopper titles), the story here is much more supernatural than many of the KTP games, being about demon possession and alternate timelines, the gameplay, while in first person like silver case and 25th ward but instead of being a traditional VN with super mild exploration it's a whole first person investigation platformer with collectathon elements and a huge island to explore and find things on, it has clues to find for the murder, music to unlock, currencies and things to buy, you get platformer abilities to unlock and a demon friend around the island to talk to, i 100%'d the game but you don't need to to complete it, if you do though there's an upgrade you can find to reveal items if that helps. this game isn't on some full parkour like a mirrors edge would be though even with the upgrades like the air dash and the double jump; it's much more basic but it is still fun to use the moveset here and explore. you can also talk to the various suspects and there's even some fairly basic puzzles to solve, it's a good time and honestly really relaxing due to both the OST and just how pretty the island is, it's a beautiful game and the vaporwave aesthetic of the island does a lot for me , it's also just a super varied place to explore, japanese inspired houses, beaches, demon hell islands, solid gold cult halls and tons of places inbetweem, the residential places were my personal favourites though, just such a nice area, many stark white buildings that almost hurt to look at. the UI is also worth a mention for just being super pretty, you can unlock tons of cool vaporwavy wallpapers for your little data PC and the motifs the game uses are all just super pretty. the character designs i'm a little more torn on, some characters like lady love dies, sam day break and crimson acid (god i love the names) look really cool but much of the male cast i'm just not into how they look, henry and sam being the exceptions, but the women largely look super well designed and where some characters lack in design , they more than make up with how interesting and fun they are to talk to and learn about.

the rest of the gameplay is largely just talking to the characters, where you have some basic dialogue choices, even a few romance ones if you want that, gathering that evidence, sometimes buying it if you need to and unlocking new areas as you go along all leading up to the trial itself, which is surprisingly short, there's only one but its a fraction of the length of your average danganronpa trial which felt strange to me, but there's a lot more variables to it so it makes sense, it's all up to you how it goes, who gets convicted, who dies, who gets off the hook, the game lets you decide for the most part as long as you have the evidence to back it up and if you don't think justice was served, it just gives you a gun to serve it yourself, it's like the game says, facts and truth are not the same, it wants you to take the facts and make your own truth out of the case, which i think was really interesting personally, and spoilers here, i chose to aquit sam and lydia as even though they did have some involvement, i think their motives were correct and compared to characters like witness and yuri, i think they were in the right, i also got henry off the hook, even though he was going to die anyway and i could have saved someone else, it just felt wrong to me to let him take the fall, i was happy with my choices. the writing is really solid overall and it has some really amazing worldbuilding, it's so in depth and the eldrich god-worshipper vaporwave paradise is a genuinely great idea for a setting and it's written well and very detailed, you can find out so much about how life was here, about all the previously failed versions of the paradise and about the upcoming "perfect 25th" island and it's own issues (which i swear is a sly jab at how dissapointing 25th ward was)

the thing that did sell me on it though before i got my hands on the physical copy was the music, the vaporwave aesthetic permiates even here and it's a whole OST of tracks from varies subgenres therein and every single song is great, you get one track to start in the games music player (which comes out of actual speakers in the environment which is really cute) but as you explore more you get more and more, you'll very quickly find your favourites as i did with songs like lady blue, the lamegton bop, midori eyes, breeze with you, sunset song and to the heart, headlights on the shore, leaving and 8th street rose also really deserve mentioning, the OST covers so much of the genre, things inspired by old game OST's, a little future funk and more traditional vaporwavey stuff, it's really a fantastic OST and i've had it on and off ever since i beat the game. the composer, who goes by epoch, deserves so much praise for this OST and you need to listen to it right now, a song from it should be playing right now so if you turn on autoplay and like what you hear, please go give it a listen.

this game was digital only for the longest time but as of very recently there was a physical release thanks to serenity forge and it's a solid release, you get some stickers and the OST..... as a download code, this does suck and i feel like of all the games to deserve a physical CD, it'd be this one, it'd fit so much better with the vibe! but sadly they cheaped out a little and we got just the code, but i'll take it, i'm just happy to have the game on disc and SF do solid releases. the studio is also coming out with a new game soon that looks pretty excellent: promise mascot agency which seems to be a mascot raising, open world card game which feels very on brand for them, so that's exciting. it also has a few different ports too, the earlier ones with ps4 and switch and xbox are solid but the most recent ps5 version added a ton of improvements so i'd say go for that version. length and difficulty-wise it's not massively long and it's also fairly easy since it doesn't expect you to have any specific versions of events and if you rush it you can easily be done in maybe 6-8 hours, 10 or so if you want that 100%, it's a very relaxed and chill experiance and one i think is well worth having, this will absolutely be on my GOTY list.