Mile
Zero

Everybody says that Paradise Killer is tough to explain, but it's actually quite simple:

• It's a detective game in the vein of Phoenix Wright, wherein
• You play as Lady Love Dies, an immortal cultist and detective-slash-"investigation freak"
• Who was exiled from the series of artificial utopias designed by her fellow immortal cultists
• (in an aesthetic somewhere between "Zapp 'n Roger album" and "Windows 95 Plus Pack screensaver")
• To revive their dead and entombed gods via ritual sacrifice at the island's peak
• Except this time, someone killed the ringleaders before they completed the ceremony
• And it's LLD's job to find out who and why, and then execute the perpetrators in the name of "justice."

A couple months after finishing it, it dawned on me that one of the interesting things about the game, for as much lore as it packs in (and it is just stuffed with flavor text), is how little it's interested in redeeming its characters. After all, everyone involved (including the protagonist) has been kidnapping and killing ordinary people for millenia in religious rituals that they don't even really seem to like very much. They're monsters, but in the most self-serving, "it's a living" kind of way.

You can (and plenty of people have) read all of this as a metaphor for late-stage capitalism. Especially as we're re-opening for the third wave of COVID-19 because The Economy Must Grow, it's hard not to see the comparison to an upper class that joylessly and incompetently tosses people onto the pyre if it'll increment GDP by a percentage point or two. But I'm less interested in the political implications than I am in how this plays against modern redemption stories.

I suspect that game narrative is often a lot closer to classic television writing than it is to movies. Part of it is the length of the experience, but some of it also has to do with the ways interactive fiction has evolved, particularly in open-world games. Ashley Burch mentions this in an interview on Kotaku about her voice career, noting that once the player has control over the order and timing of activities, it puts limits on the amount of change that a character can believably accomodate — naive and hopeful voice lines in an early quest will seem wildly out of place if the protagonist has spent 40 hours becoming gradually more embittered, and vice versa. The result is that the writing has to have a central core that's largely unchangeable, much in the way that episodic TV used to reset at the end of every show.

For TV, arc-based narratives changed that. Once there are consequences across multiple episodes, and the longer you spend with a character (especially in genre fiction), the more tempting it is to find an excuse or rationale for their actions. Jaime Lannister isn't necessarily evil, he's led astray by his sister. Darth Vader is made a monster by the Emperor, and we'll see how it happened across six movies before George Lucas washes his hands of the whole thing. These kinds of heel-face turns are classic drama, they give actors and writers a lot to chew on, and they are often comforting to the audience, since they serve to reinforce our moral compass.

In contrast, Paradise Killer's cast isn't interested in rehashing their crimes, and so the game just... doesn't do it. It's not unaware — side characters, especially outsiders, will mention how inhuman the whole thing is — but it would be wildly out of character for someone like Lady Love Dies to have a change of heart and deliver a lengthy monologue about the terrible unfairness of it all. She's at the top of the heirarchy and she got there by committing awful, banal atrocities — the kind that aren't fun for an "investigation freak" to dig into. This game is not going to help reassure you that the evil-doers just need to come to their senses. In fact, it argues that they already have.