‘You have an enemy friendo’, so I do. Awoken, and without prior context I was exhumed like a corpse from his hovel and thrust into a tense exchange with a stranger reprimanding our character, what the f**k is going on? Well, welcome to Paratopic, friendo. Swathed in an art style akin to the bleak atmosphere of the ps1’s liminal low poly landscapes, my time with Paratopic was equally as intriguing and confounding as it first appeared to be. I navigated its dissonant landscapes with dialogue choices, loaded revolvers, lonesome road trips and hikes through barren forests. All of this amounted to an experience I can only liken to a kaleidoscopic, neurotic nightmare straight from the bowels of David Lynch’s fever dreams and William Burroughs’ acerbic novel, Naked Lunch. So, akin to my experiences with the prior comparisons, I don’t feel as if I’ve played Paratopic, I was accosted by it, gripped by it, and enamoured all the while. Equally as bleak and sordid as it is utterly isolating, Paratopic certainly exists to distill all of the aforementioned emotions, warping them and us with it.

Paratopic can be clarified somewhat when likened to a tapestry of interconnected instances of despair, sordid souls, loneliness and trickery, opaque in that it simply evades one’s attempts to pinpoint certain emotions evoked or the involvement demanded of us, the player. First there’s an interrogation, there’s tapes, crow’s pecking the strewn carcass on a roadside and a flayed carcass skewered on a spike. I had lied my way through conversations, supplied and denied fawning seedy eyes who clamoured over goods I was given and somewhere in there a shadow assaulted me and I talked with a solitary cashier about alien conspiracies, oh, and waffles.

Presented as a fragmented mystery, we as the player are given the full picture only after repeat playthroughs. A single playthrough lasts around forty minutes, yet this is not sufficient, there is more for us to see. It felt like a bad acid trip all over again, as indecipherable radio chatter with strewn decipherable words amidst gibberish, hazy psychedelic visuals and a world which seemed not as it once was. This, paired with the decontextualised conversations placed me in a spot of reactive unease, sort of like an ill-planned surprise party with all the people you’ve ever hated arriving in attendance, greeting you with saccharin hellos. It is far too frequent that games denote our purpose, as the player in its world, or lead us through conversations with distinct tells of their ensuing outcome, Paratopic shies away from this, instead depicting us as a scabrous nobody, a loser, hiker, or even a deviant, driver or gunman, some repertoire right? Its kaleidoscopic array of visions are left to be deciphered, and so very little is truly denoted.

The car journeys of its runtime can be interpreted in a number of varied ways: are we escaping? What is this box, are we a drug mule? Are we a murderer on the run, or simply heading toward a hiking route, upon which we shall unwittingly uncover a grisly mutilated corpse? Even these liminal interval segments spawn a slew of questions and intrigue, pleading for you to venture deeper into the game’s ever changing mysteries. All of which is underpinned by a stellar soundscape. Sonically this ranges vastly from sounding akin to Bowie and Eno’s work on his album Low, to the likes of the Drive soundtrack and even Mac Quayle’s work on the Mr Robot soundtrack. As diverse as its disconnected instances of interaction, boredom and lies we wade through.

Having found a moment of respite in a petrol (that’s gas for you Americans) station, talking innate chatter to a conspiracy theorist, I began to reflect. I felt a swift epiphany wash over me, I knew just then, that I had absolutely no idea what was happening. Throughout its short run time, Paratopic instilled within me all forms of emotion, these flowed forth as fear, disgust, intrigue, repulsion, disdain, peace and even isolation. Through such dissonant landscapes I found intrigue, sanctuary and horror. Paratopic is equally as obtuse to discern as it is to decipher, though I cannot quite say that I’ve ever experienced such intrigue as this interaction imbued within me.

Believing my initial playthrough would suffice, serving as a fragmented insight into an altered reality. Ultimately those who have or are yet to play this game will know this to be false. The ending flash screen will detail the scenes you have and have not experienced. More is required to untangle this haggard thread of a splintered story. Thus I was left with innumerable questions. Questions which, akin to a Lynch film, would, upon pondering, foster only further questions. For not all, if nothing is answered concretely. It evades definition and dogmatic narrative beats. Forgoing all to be in service of, akin to the aforementioned Naked Lunch comparison, a fractured tale of sordid and unkempt lives. All the questions which arose throughout each experience were often left unanswered, but did it truly need an answer? For each one had elicited such vivid emotions, as if it were an encapsulation of a discordant slew of dreams. It made me feel something, that I can admit. It needn’t answer the questions it poses, it needn’t be much more than a dreamlike odyssey through this sordid recollection we endure. It was as if I had stumbled upon a bundle of VHS tapes consisting of macabre and grotesque imagery. With each one I was led through my aforementioned emotions, each one affected me to some degree. I don’t understand Paratopic, I don’t feel like I need to. I felt it, that for me at least, suffices to be a worthwhile experience.