Paradise Lost | PC Review

“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.” – John Milton, Paradise Lost

World War 2 is a never ending source of inspiration for movies, books, and games. It was a fairly black-and-white conflict where good eventually triumphs over evil and was the stage for both the best and the worst of humanity. Even after almost 70 years, that conflict is still giving us an enormous amount of good stories. In science fiction, there is also a sub-genre that deals with alternative histories, and WW2 is also a very interesting subject for this genre. You can think of the book The Man In High Castle by Philip K Dick (and its TV equivalent), the Star Trek episode Patterns of Force, the movie Iron Sky, or even the Tarantino film Inglorious Basterds. It’s a very entertaining sub-genre of “What If?” stories. And now, developers PolyAmorous and publisher All in! Games add their story Paradise Lost to the list.

Awake, Arise or Be for Ever Fall’n

In Paradise Lost, you play Szymon. He’s a boy raised in post-apocalyptic Poland of 1980. He has found a hidden Nazi bunker and goes exploring it. His mother has died recently, and the bunker somehow has a significance to them: he wants to find out what exactly happened there. As you discover more and more of this underground world and see more of the retro futuristic technology, you slowly come to realize something very, very bad took place there in the past. And you must find out what. So you go ever deeper into the darkness, because there is no more turning back. 

Never Can True Reconcilement Grow Where Wounds of Deadly Hate Have Pierced So Deep

I would describe Paradise Lost as Gone Home meets Bioshock meets Fallout (without any shooting). It is a walking simulator like Gone Home, meaning that the story progresses fairly linearly and is told by the surroundings and the notes, tapes and items Szymon finds on his way down the bunker. There are no huge puzzles, no one to have a conversation with (or is there?), and yet it is not boring at all. It takes place in a retro futuristic environment like Bioshock, except there are no enemies trying to kill you.

Here, everyone is already dead, despite the fancy tech they have strewn about the place. The world has gone to the dogs, as atomic bombs have dropped down on large parts of Europe. This is very similar to Fallout, that also takes place in a post-apocalyptic world and bunkers play an important role. There are more similarities to Fallout, but going into those would be spoilers. However, Paradise Lost is its own thing and PolyAmorous took a lot of time and effort to make it that.

Solitude Sometimes Is Best Society

Gameplay is very easy and straightforward. You move around the world with mouse and keyboard, and if Szymon comes across anything he can manipulate, a simple click of the mouse will do so. Sometimes he has to find objects to proceed, but most objects he can pick up are decorative and add to the atmosphere. There are plenty of notes and letters to be collected, as well as tape recorders with voice messages. Some of these trigger a flashback, where you get to play a short scene from Szymon’s past that somehow ties in to the main story. All together, these fragments tell the story of the Nazis who built the bunker as well as the Polish resistance fighters who attacked the bunker at one point. And it all builds up to something unthinkable.

A Mind Not To Be Changed By Place or Time

As mentioned above, there are no real puzzles, just the collection of items to proceed or the occasional switch to throw. It all helps to keep the focus on the story because this is where Paradise Lost shines. As I went deeper into the bunker, a sense of dread crept in, this slow realization that something terrible had happened here. While Szymon was never in any real danger (it’s not that kind of game), I was getting anxious about what all this meant for him. Like the protagonist of John Milton’s poem of the same name, Szymon is going deeper underground, deeper into hell. Except here, it’s the stages of grief that Szymon has to go through, and each chapter is named after one of them.

The Mind Is Its Own Place, and In Itself…

The graphics are great, and there are quite a few surprises to be found. They manage to nail the retro futuristic aesthetic and let their imagination loose. It was a joy to wander around and the deeper you go, the weirder things get. PolyAmorous also drew inspiration from Slavic folklore, and that becomes especially clear later in the game. The sound plays an important role too, from the different effects to the silence that can be experienced underground at times. The game is completely voice-acted, from Szymon to the different characters he ‘meets’ when he listens to their tapes. This adds to the atmosphere in a very good way.

Can Make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n

I came across a few bugs while playing Paradise Lost, and my computer surely had to work hard to run the game. That is on me, of course, but I would still recommend checking the recommended system requirements to be sure you’ll get smooth gameplay. If you want to play the game on console, then none of this is an issue. The few bugs I encountered were not very spectacular, and I expect them to be fixed with a patch. One room, for instance, had items floating in the air, as the desk they were supposed to be on never materialized. Another had a tape play the original Polish text instead of the translated English one. It’s minor things really, none of it was game breaking or took me out of the story.

Conclusion

Paradise Lost is all about the exploration and the story. If you are interested in a cool retro futuristic alternative history tale and don’t mind the slow gameplay inherent to a walking simulator, then this is a game you’re gonna enjoy immensely. If you want more action in your games, then this might not be the game for you. I enjoyed the game very much and managed to finish the game in slightly more than 6 hours. The game came to a very satisfactory ending for me and I might revisit it at a later point to explore the ending some more with an updated PC. And to revel in the fact that in this alternative history, the Nazis also didn’t win the war. Good will always triumph over evil.

To hear me talk more about Paradise Lost, be sure to listen to Episode 341 of The Gaming Outsider Podcast.

This review is based on a PC copy of Paradise Lost provided by Evolve PR for coverage purposes. It is also available on Xbox One and PlayStation 4.