Paratopic
Release date: Sep 6, 2018
Developers: Arbitrary Metric
Publishers: Serenity Forge
Genres: Adventure, Indie
Categories: Single-player, Steam Achievements, Full controller support, Captions available, Family Sharing
Supported languages: English, Japanese

'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 An anachronistic blend of modern and outdated production as glitches and textural pads meet synthesis & sampling akin to a haunted recollection of 90s Unreal Engine soundtracks. 

Press reviews: “Paratopic sticks with you. It's the kind of game that lingers, haunting the dark corners of your mind after its credits roll. There's something off about it in a delightful way; the atmospheric fever dream of low-poly horror imagery shows, but never tells.” Destructoid “Paratopic‘s city is a sooty husk, a ruin whose scarce inhabitants eke out day-to-day existence by taking dangerous smuggling jobs, murdering for money, or reconfiguring their flesh in agonized cathode-ray rapture.” Heterotopias “Paratopic is a short first-person horror game which draws ideas from Thirty Flights Of Loving but takes them somewhere terrible, leading them down an alley and through an unmarked door into a world which looks a bit like ours but just isn’t right.” Rock, Paper, Shotgun