Our Limited Truth in Paradise Killer
Or, why the facts and the truth might not be the same in Island Sequence 24
Paradise Killer is a game that wants you to figure it out for its own sake. No objective markers, just a folder of evidence and some key locations, waiting for you to want to make goals. Throughout the game there are terms, proper nouns, and foreign processes thrown about with few attempts at explicit on-boarding. You’re given enough to connect the premise to current events, but there is no codex that explains who the Silent Goat is, or the extensive histories behind the other island sequences, or what blood crystals are and why they’re currency. I remember being as overwhelmed and lost in the beginning stages of my play-through as I was discovering the vaporwave that inspired the game. I had never been more intrigued, either. I knew that this was a game I wanted to find the dreamlike and existentially jaded center of.
When you make the drop from the Idle Lands of your exile to the decaying Island Sequence 24, you’re given only the most critical issue and your only imperatives. The Council has been killed, everyone thinks it was the disgruntled youth, and it falls to you to figure out who killed Paradise. Most importantly, the game tells you that facts and the truth are not the same.
Bold stance, right? There are people I personally know and respect that dislike this particular line of thinking. It’s the only consistent complaint I’ve heard among the otherwise universal praise I hear regarding Paradise Killer. I mean, given the escalated tensions between narrative and truth for the past five or so years, it’s understandable to raise an eyebrow at a thesis statement that attempts to further weather the dam between truth and narrative. Now, more than ever, it seems important that material reality and our conceptions of the truth remain fixed at the same point, for fear of the sinister reinterpretations we still endure now.
So why would Paradise Killer go against that? Why lean into subjectivity? I think it has a purpose, but it’s going to take a second to get there, okay?
Paradise Killer is a game that understands vaporwave. A lot of people who’ve been curious about the movement know some of the basics, but a bit of context for posterity!
Daniel Lopatin uploaded a video in 2009 on YouTube titled Nobody Here, using a slowed down sample of Chris DeBurgh’s Lady in Red with additional effects, set to a backdrop with visuals purportedly ripped from an old Taito arcade game. While a surreal rainbow road sweeps across the metropolitan night skyline, Chris’s sour-pitched baritone wails into the marsh-like synth soundscape with a cry that nobody is here. With its lush and also discordant sound, the sense of space it gives saw positive reception as people comment on how calming it is, while also feeling unnerved. In 2010 he would then create and release an album under the pseudonym Chuck Person, titled Eccojams. The songs would be styled and produced in the same manner as Nobody Here, sampled to the point of dubious legality, and tweaked to be dreamlike parodies of themselves.
Sooner or later, people floated terms that captured the feeling of this new genre. As copycats contributed their works and pioneers started creating branching paths within it, the genre stuck to a name: Vaporwave. The name is commonly said to be taken from the word vaporware, a term commonly used to describe a piece of hardware or software that is announced but never released. It is a word for a broken promise, for something we know about but will never experience. Numerous acts released their defining works within the genre, such as MACINTOSH PLUS’s FLORAL SHOPPE — 02 リサフランク420 — 現代のコンピュー, that song most people know and likely thinks of when one thinks of the word ‘Vaporwave’. It then split into a million sub-genres. Utopian Virtual, Faux Utopian Virtual, Future Funk, VHS Pop, Late Night Lo-Fi, and oh god there’s so many more. Both the soundtrack and visuals employ aspects of them to some degree.
It is from here that everyone makes the same A E S T H E T I C joke, you know, the word everyone types in mono-type like I just did. But works like these helped establish the aesthetic trends and might clue us in on the emotions that inspire these. 80’s and 90’s synth pop, surreal personal computer imagery, hyper-corporate and sterile filler art, and japanese influences are some of the most common tropes you’ll see. SAINT PEPSI makes its statement clear just starting with its name: We are nostalgic for a time that we might have felt existed, a void of consumption to fill some aching hole within us as we think about going to Blockbuster Video after crawling along the McPlayplace post-Happy Meal. MACROSS 82–99 shows us the glamour and wonder of Japan during its Post War Economic Miracle, which has its roots in the westernization after Japan’s surrender in WWII, which was largely overseen by General Douglas MacArthur.
Considering the… uh, suggestive logo for Dead Nebula’s drink machines, the posters of Crimson Acid posing for the camera like a model as the island’s idol, and the speakers radiating original stylings provided by EPOCH… well, there’s a lot to consume on Island Sequence 24. There’s also a lack of much else. Obelisks of onyx and amethyst are strewn about, there are countless statues to gods as alien to us as we are to this world. We don’t see much of community spaces like parks, or much of space at all. I can’t really say what citizens of this place do besides toy around with the products they purchase in their spare time. Even in the game, activities that don’t involve picking up clues and talking to people are limited to picking up consumer goods.
As a result of its influences, the game is screwy. It’s also a big ol’ whodunnit where finding out the who that dunnit determines the direction of society itself. After all, someone has killed paradise, gutted Syndicate leadership, and very obviously propped up a scapegoat to obscure the obvious inside job. If you fail, paradise itself will simply die another death. Perfect 25 will be imperfect on day one.
The game is a dream to navigate as you dive in, especially once you find the foot baths that boost your mobility. Clues are engaging to find, and there’s not a ton of pressure to approach the mystery like a set of puzzles. As someone who beelines open world games on a death march through its main campaign, I was so surprisingly, easily entranced into exploration and was content to comb the island thoroughly. I was hypnotized by the extent to which the island is constructed like a scrapbook collage of art histories and manifold eras of aestheticism.
As I unraveled mysteries and conspiracies, saw the specters of people who paid in blood for the island’s maintenance: The cobbled together art felt more like a ransom note.
But, wait! Lady Love Dies is not trusted completely by the inhabitants, save for Judge. The game makes pains to mention an event that happened three million days before the start of the game, the deception she suffered at the hands of the god, Damned Harmony. Her own hubris prevented her from ever thinking it could happen to her, and thus the actions she took while under the blinds of her deception led to the collapse of Island Sequence 13. It does a good job of providing the other characters reasonable means to doubt Love Dies’s ability to assess things accurately. But, hey, you’re in the pilot’s seat, now. Since you’re controlling her, you’ve clearly got a handle on gathering and interpreting evidence. Let’s breathe life back into Paradise, baby!
With that in mind, the knots of the conspiracy can be unraveled by pulling on any and all loose ends you find in the game. In fact, it’s done to the point where every culprit you can submit evidence for has reasonably done it, even if that means overlaps in reality itself between play-throughs. So, what does that mean? Is it just a pithy statement about how the truth is subjective depending on how you frame it? Are there really alternative facts? Is our perception of the truth fragile and easily manipulated? Is this a gotcha for all of us who were clinging to the idea of an objective truth during the assault on reality itself during the past 5 years? Just trust in your own truth, pile the evidence you like onto it, and trust that you got the “right” ending that runs in accordance to your own perception of the events?
C’mon, the game’s got more than that.
So why, then, is the game so comfortable in its openness? It defies the desire to find a ‘canon’ ending, and seemingly lets you forge your own interpretation of how the next island will fare now that you’ve solved the mystery of the paradise killer. It’s something I’ve seen the game praised for, something that doesn’t resemble the dictatorship of the ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘true’ ending trichotomy. Your truth is your own, as the game says.
Alright, no more beating around the bush.
It doesn’t matter who committed the crime to end all crimes. No singular person is why someone felt the need to kill the Council and put the Syndicate’s existence in peril. The reason that the game is asking you to find your own truth is because Lady Love Dies is not equipped to see it. The entire premise of the Syndicate and its island projects is rotten to its core, and that’s why every single one came to ruin, and it’s why every one after will come to the same fate.
I played this game sometimes wishing I could be on this island. It’s a dreamland with music I wish were more popular, drinks I wish were real, and filled with art and artful touches. It has a vibe I desperately wish I could feel. These days feel so sober, and absurd for all the wrong reasons. I also love a lot of people on this island, they seem cool and like I could be their friends. There are some people I hate, and it felt good that they started throwing each other off the cliff as I inched one person towards it. I can see why someone would feel good taking down the conspiracy, weaving around the facts to conveniently leave out Lydia and Sam, let them go free as they yearn to be. The island is safe and your old friends are bound no more, yay! The play is resolved, and the theater of Syndicate politics draws to a close. Bravo, Lady Love Dies, you stood up for justice. Dare I say it? A little bit of a girlboss.
But the game’s most important demonstration of vaporwave is what the memory of it exposes. The islands are maintained with a population of hostages, one whose figments you can find and interact with. Each one gives you a regret you can resolve to help them move on. With these, you see what these islands cost. People are encouraged to define themselves based on what’s provided for consumption, because the work done to preserve the island saps the workers of all sense of self.
I don’t think it’s for nothing, after all, that one of the ghosts just wanted the shiny stone they found for their partner. A person became so struck by finding something outside the corporate ecosystem that intrigued them, that they bound it to the most eternal part of their very being.
Alienated from themselves, it is inevitable that each sequence opens itself up to something vile that lingers on the edges of the void, and someone comes to disrupt the status quo. People become twisted into spiraling coils of white-hot frustration, like Henry Division, who the Syndicate will never mourn. When it is clear that those in power have failed, when the machine stops, the blood of the people below them is spilled to make the cogs turn once more. They try again. Most of the time, they’re content to let its schemers stay where they are and let them do it again.
Paradise Killer understands vaporwave, because while it can refer to vaporware, it is as much about the transformation of the solid state of goods fashioned by the upper class for the workers into a gaseous state. It’s a fleeting and hollow passage of yearning, because vaporware also means a broken promise. Because it means a thing that we know about but will never experience.
Lady Love Dies is part of this upper class, the Syndicate, those who collect the blood of those who serve in order to preserve the dream of paradise, unaware or uncaring that it only applies to the Syndicate. You can have her briefly question aspects of Syndicate life to Shinji, our outsider point of view, but the game’s ending makes it clear that Love Dies is just as part of the system as anyone she can execute (which is everyone!). Everyone is culpable. Sam and Lydia just want out, they’ve had enough of the icky parts and they’ve gotten what they’ve wanted anyway. Doctor Doom Jazz is perfectly fine with how things are going, it seems, especially when that broken door lets him doff some manner of accountability. Crimson Acid is merely unhappy with her place within the structure, clearly having committed horrors to get there. It’s not for nothing that most of the blood you collect on the island, you give to her.
That’s why the ending is as open and as malleable as it is. The game reads to me that the minutiae of it all doesn’t matter, even as it works to sell that minutiae. They’ve created a compelling mystery that wants you to solve it on your own terms, and the answer is that very few of those damning details matter. That’s why the game gives you whiskey pick-ups that show you cutscenes set during the 25th Island Sequence. The island, the Syndicate, and the entire process behind them, is preserved and running as it otherwise would without intervention. Even if you execute Sam and Lydia Daybreak for either their direct involvement in the crime or just for their complicity in the system, they’re implied to have lived on in a different form in the next sequence. We focus on the individuals of the Syndicate rather than the collective agreement that what they do is acceptable enough to let continue.
In Paradise Killer you can choose to unravel the conspiracy and remove the most toxic elements of the Syndicate, you can execute everyone, or you can go back to the courthouse immediately after you start the game to escort everyone’s most convenient pet theory into legitimacy. You can ensure every actor is hidden behind the obvious scapegoat. The game lets you think you have all the freedom in the world, but the thing it doesn’t tell you is that every fact you know is trapped within the worldview of Lady Love Dies, member of the Syndicate. If you can be deceived by a god, then what is stopping a system? How could she think of meaningful change?
It begs a question, as well. Is it possible to be thrown so many facts that you can miss the truth?
This all brings me to say the most central thing that Paradise Killer has been urging me to say, which is my truth. There is no paradise killer in the game Paradise Killer, because paradise was never alive in the first place.
