(dark, moody jazz music playing) (car door slamming) (engine starting) - [Ragnar] I used to drive a lot. Various circumstances in my life – a long distance relationship.. a job a little further away... studying in a place far from my hometown – had me regularly sitting in the car for distances
of one to several hours straight. And I gotta admit that over time I grew to enjoy these long drives quite a
bit. Whether the roads were free or full of
construction sites or traffic jams, I learned to turn these liminal journeys into rejuvenating, almost zen-like experiences. My go-to stimulus would be either
listening to music or audiobooks. And sometimes I’d even keep the radio off
and let my mind wander aimlessly without any of the manifold distractions
we’re being bombarded with in our daily lives. For a perpetually racing ADHD brain,
this can be quite the cerebral adventure, let me tell you. And over time, I noticed something... fascinating: I could drive from A to B for multiple hours and my mind would become this swirling miasma
of tantalizing thoughts and turgid ideas, completely engulfed in thought for the entire
trip -- and then all of a sudden I’d be at my
destination. (snap) I was just there, almost like I teleported. It felt like... waking up from a long,
restless and meandering fever dream. Of course I was awake and attentive
throughout the entire drive. I had successfully maneuvered my car along
the road, always staying between the guard rails, gracefully evading other cars and obstacles, and probably following at least 80%
of the traffic rules ...educated guess. But if I tried to recall any actual palpable
moments, sounds, places from the commute itself, anything specific? - [Ancient Reptilian Brain] There is nothing. - [Ragnar] Where do all these impressions
go? An immeasurable stream of information
had rushed past me over hours of continuous sensual exposure and my brain decided, without my knowledge
or... consent, that every single bit of it is.... collateral, dead weight, declared unfit to be stored within the limited capacity
of my long term memory and simply... flushes it out of my cerebral
cortex... into the void. - [Herman Toothrot] If a tree falls in the
forest and no one is around to hear it... what color is the tree? - [Guybrush] All colors? - [Herman] Exactly! - [Ragnar] What if this uncountable stream
of... liminal data was actually somehow.. intercepted, catalogued and stored by someone,
something, some entity – and what if we could get ahold of it? (Paratopic main theme playing) If I were granted a fairy wish to change something in the worldwide
video game landscape, I would make it so games overall would be Shorter - [Ingame Character] “Ill catch up!” - [Ragnar] Less obsessed with graphical fidelity
and technical flexing And that the people who make them
aren’t routinely coerced into exploitative, hypercompetitive crunch labor. - [Arthur Morgan] “Are you crazy?!” - [Ragnar] There definitely is a place for
long games, but more often than not, excessive playtime
is achieved by padding games out with hours upon hours of mediocre
to uninspired assembly-line filler-content. I’ve always loved games that get their message
across with as much respect to the player’s time
as possible, utilizing the space they’re taking up
to maximum efficiency – games where every moment has something
to say. - [Davey Wreden] “It says what it wants
to say, and then it ends.” - [Ragnar] Paratopic is a prime example for a game whose short playtime is almost
ridiculously densely packed. My first playthrough took me
maybe an hour to get through. This was an hour spent mostly
wondering what is even going on and what the hell I'm actually doing, or... even who I am to begin with. It left me confused, bewildered and
frankly even a bit irritated. Like many people I spoke to
that had played it, I initially put it out of sight, out of mind. At first. But.. there was something about Paratopic that kept silently gnawing at my grey cells like an incessant colony of termites. Like an intrusive thought I can’t shake, I kept thinking about it,
again and again, and always in very different contexts. - [Gas Station Clerk] (strange distorted speech) This video is not so much meant to be a review of Paratopic, but more of an exploration of its themes
and pondering about its... metanarrative, and everything else that I... just... need to get out, somehow. Now this is the unavoidable moment
where I would tell you that this video will contain spoilers for
Paratopic -- although this game is a bit of a special
case. You don’t need to have played it
to understand this video. I’m providing all the context you need
to understand the points I’m trying to make. A single playthrough of Paratopic
is quite short, as I said, something around an hour of raw playtime, and it doesn't offer all that much
in terms of traditional “pew-pew” gameplay. The game features a stark lofi-retro-inspired
aesthetic that nails its uncanny, surrealistic atmosphere through thoughtful and consistent
visual-, narrative-, sound- and music design. But Paratopic is one of those titles that
has so, so much more going on
than you can grasp during one playthrough. It’s a story that you'll likely finish unsure
what it even was that you just witnessed, but that sticks to your mind like a barnacle and keeps occupying your thoughts
for long after you put it down. And although it feels quite linear, it's astounding how intricately its short
interactive narrative is constructed. Every time you replay it, you will find an abundance of things
you didn’t notice before. At first glance, they might feel like
random weirdness or unimportant fluff. But once you meet Paratopic on its own terms, you’ll start realizing just how
inexhaustibly deep the rabbit hole goes. If you want to get your own impression of
Paratopic before I start clubbing its authors to death and over-analyzing it for longer than it takes
to finish the game itself -- and experience it yourself before my ramblings will forever bias what *you* see in its
convoluted, otherworldly narrative, then by all means: Stop this video here,
get the game, and play through it once, or several times, however you like. It's available on itch.io and Steam, and it was just recently released
on the Nintendo Switch as well and at the time of release of this video
you can get it for around 5-ish US-Dollars. And I'm certain that if any of what you’ve
seen and heard about it in this video so far
hadn’t put you off and/or piqued your interest, you won't regret that choice in the slightest. It's far more likely that Paratopic
will sit with you for a good while. Now... where do I even begin to unravel this? Paratopic comes along in such an innocuous,
tiny frame, yet is spun more intricately
than the world’s largest ball of yarn. It’s like an onion, man,
it has layers. I could begin by recapitulating the story, or what the game decides to show of it. (otherworldly electric discharge) Over the course of its playtime, you assume the role of three playable characters
from a first person POV: A man who’s coerced into smuggling
contraband VHS-tapes across.. the not-further-specified “border”, an assassin preparing to kill a key-figure
in the production and trade of said tapes, and a nature photographer stumbling across
the remains of mysterious, abandoned illicit industry
deep in the forest... These story-arcs are connected, most visibly through the game's central McGuffin - the
tapes whose content we never get to witness directly, and the ominous shadow-company
behind the whole affair. But if I'm gonna be honest with you -- the first time I played it, I hadn't even put together that I was playing
3 completely different people. That might be me being a little bit on the
dense side, but that also tells you a lot about
how much Paratopic loves to obfuscate its narrative. This has a lot to do with
where the game places its focus on, and what it deliberately decides to omit. Many people would, at this point in time in
gaming culture, intuitively describe Paratopic as a Walking
Simulator. But looking at how this game tells its story, how skillfully it uses video-game atypical
stylistic devices, and how meticulously it employs
common video game affordances, some of them implemented to perfection
only to use them precisely once -- to me, this game is far more of a
statement *on* Walking Simulators. And at the same time on the First Person Game
in general; how we, as players consume them. In the very first minutes of the game,
after a short bit of confusing dialogue, it... quite literally places Chekhov's Gun
right in front of your nose. As you're sitting in a shabby diner that feels like a pixelated sister-outlet
of Winkie's from Mulholland Drive, your first interaction as the assassin character... you pick up your revolver, grab each bullet individually, eject the cylinder of your gun, and insert each cartridge one.. by one. The game, quite consciously,
doesn't give you any tutorial prompts, teaching you what button to press
in order to reload your piece. Or alright, it does so, but only if you don’t figure it out
on your own for quite a while. But ... I personally didn't need one,
because I’m one of those many players who have been conditioned by the abundance of firearm-based action games I’ve played
in the past, so without even thinking about it, I pushed the button I was drilled to reload
guns with ever since games like Half-Life had standardized
it: I pressed R... and as expected, a bullet slid into the chamber. This is veeery innocuous
and I didn't even register it at first, but it goes in line with a theme
that permeates especially the assassin storyline. Paratopic heavily insinuates violence
that is about to happen and that always hangs in the air. But this is not really something we
bat an eye over in a first person game, do we? It’s common practice for first person shooters
to lead you straight into action and fulfil the promise of violence
within the first minutes of the game - an appetizer for the blood-thirsty audience exceptions definitely prove the rule here. And that's fine..... That’s what you paid for isn’t it? - [Konrad] You’re here because you
wanted to feel like something you’re not. A hero. - [Ragnar] So, expecting shit to go down
when you approach Paratopic without knowing anything about it beforehand; this is exactly what the expectation the game
sets up. But instead of satisfying it... (door slams) You get... striking mundanity. (slow, atmospheric music playing) (Call of Duty soundtrack playing) Paratopic starts on a typical pacing curve suited for a high-intensity thriller: Four short scenes gradually build up
the expectation for immediate action; the smuggler and the assassin
getting briefed on their jobs in a diner. The game puts a gun right in front of you,
and makes you load it in preparation. And then you carefully approach the target, loaded pistol in hand, ready to strike. The pacing curve exponentially approaches
its peak. And when you breach the door,
ready to unleash hell, Paratopic steps on the brakes, full stop - flatlining the curve
from one moment to the next, knowingly denying the audience
the payoff it so meticulously set up. Instead, all of a sudden, you‘re in a
small, shabby apartment house lobby. A cigarette butt smolders in an ashtray. You look around and call the elevator and... wait for it. You wait. And wait. The analogue display needle creeps along agonizingly
slow, indicating the cabin's languid descent. This could almost be described as... (ding) boredom. When the elevator arrives,
the door opens and you step in, the game jarringly jump cuts you
up to the apartment floor it almost feels like being teleported
out of nowhere. A woman talks to you in the smoke-laden hallway; says some men were in your apartment earlier. So from previous conversations
that means you're playing as... the smuggler.. right now? The game never outright tells you
whose shoes you occupy at the moment and revels in obfuscating
the necessary context more often than not. After a brief talk, you step into
your messy, closet-sized apartment and find the suitcase your contacts have left
for you. Inside, the portentous video cassettes. Your neighbor butts in unannounced
and nosily asks you to... give her one one of the tapes. (unintelligible speech) It's completely up to you if you indulge her. (unintelligible speech) If you do give in, you’ll find her sitting in her apartment, staring obsessively into the tube, consuming the contents of the tape in rapture
and.... (organic cracking noises) (relieved exhaling) A large part of the rest of the game is
-- contrary to previous expectation -- surprisingly mundane. The smuggling job turns out not to be
some sort of gameplay challenge where you have to meticulously
plan and execute your routes across the border, no hi-octane evasions of border cops,
nor hot pursuit car chases or something. You just drive. You drive along the empty highway,
the suitcase full of tapes riding shotgun. Your only go-to stimulus is either
listening to music, talk shows - or just keep the radio off
and let your mind wander aimlessly (static) without any of the manifold distractions we’re being bombarded with in our daily lives. Wait why is there a gun in my passenger's
seat now? I could there was the suitcase with the tapes
there just a second ago or... was that during an earlier drive segment? I thought I was playing as the smuggler during
the car segments. Am I the assassin? ww.. what the- Time spent between two places of interest. Traversing liminal space. (unintelligible speech) Lil’ Chit-chat with the gas-station clerk. Talking about energy drinks with lots of berries
(static) the moral hubris of rich people
claiming superiority over everyone else, and that famous waffle place that burned down. Man they really had good waffles. Things ain't how they used to be. Did the fucking snack-machine just eat my
dollar? (sigh) Piece of sh- You're a bird watcher with a camera following an elusive red bird that simply won't hold still for the perfect picture. It leads you deeper and deeper into the hinterlands, where you find trees mysteriously cut off. It's like some kind of...
Tunguska-incident has occurred here... sometime in recent years. ...still driving tattered remnants of old, decaying industry, abandoned refineries decommissioned pipelines ruins that lament a once
prosperous era of economic hubris long gone arm-chair philosophy about... the moral superiority of Aliens, the greatest shitty tourist traps of the area and of course, the collapse and decay
of the region a bit over a decade ago wait is there someone standing next to my
car? hiking further into the woods Still tailing the red bird remnants of long-decommissioned industry cargo containers, abandoned why are there surveillance cameras here are they still... active? wait - I’ve seen this symbol before... Until this point,
far over half of the game's playtime we spent with things that are strikingly...
uneventful -- especially for a game where you play
as a smuggler *and* an assassin. There is a constant tension hanging in the
air, carried by this uneasy certainty that something's...
off. It's almost like the game gaslights you into constantly feeling observed, stalked, as if some eldritch force is watching your
every move, but you have no idea why;
or often times even who -- and WHEN you are. And at the same time, you're lulled
into an uneasy sense of... safety through the conscious use of gameplay conventions. The game knowingly plays with game feel to
pull that off. Paratopic is the type of game
that a certain kind of Gamer would dismissively dub as "not a real game" -- which is usually an accolade that the devs are doing some great stuff if you ask me. The way its narrative is structured
up until this point, knowingly establishes it as a"walking simulator". A seemingly linear story-progression without the traditional gameplay challenges offered in most other video games
in the same technical framework -- i.e. first person shooters. Paratopic does this to,
just like in the beginning, set up expectations in order to subvert them. Just like the opening established
the expectation of active violence and then tore it away -- at this point, when players have been
firmly rooted in walking simulator gameplay over multiple scenes of observation-focused,
low-intensity gameplay (loud, eldritch noises, hard thud) it pulls the rug from under
the player's feet once more. The game eventually cuts straight back to the when the assassin is about to
breach the back-room of the diner, zero build-up this time, gun in hand and (loud gunshot) When I encountered this scene for the first
time, similar to how I intuitively pressed "R"
to load the revolver in the opening segment, I felt almost startled by how reflexively
I had snapped right into killer mode, and how I went straight for an
execution-style headshot. How I, as someone with years
of ingrained shooter-experience, didn't even think nor hesitate for a split-second -- but like a trained attack dog went straight
for the artery. Look at the mess I've made. This guy, a video technician or something
like that -- he was apparently doing some kind of work
related to those ominous VHS tapes -- probably deeply immersed in what he was doing, unarmed and not expecting a thing. From one instant to the next
he got his brain sprayed all across the room. I did this. - [Will Graham] This is my design. - [Ragnar] Paratopic makes a point
in how fast everything is over, how anticlimactic this murder scene, that was built up from the very beginning,
feels. A literal heartbeat and it's done. But instead of flexing over the
instant gratification of virtual murder - the game almost obsesses over... the consequences. You pick up a tape from the pile -- one of the red ones, the juicy ones -- and when you shove it in the VCR... (muffled gunshot) You relive the scene once more. NOT the thrill of the build-up, NOT the endorphin rush of the
climactic instant of pulling the trigger, NOT the loud, succulent BANG of your Magnum -- it cuts straight to the result of your
actions. A clumsily muffled, cut-off
acoustic residue of the gunshot, the lifeless body sagging awkwardly to the
floor, the guy's brain spraying across the room once
again. It’s like your nose being shoved
into the doo-doo you just made on the carpet - [Patrick] LOOK AT IT! I find this scene fascinating for many reasons. I found several people talking about this
game describe this scene in particular as excessively
violent - [Mandalore] The birdwatcher can, well, take
pictures of birds and the assassin can make one of the
gnarliest headshots since the movie Brick - [Ragnar] The thing is: I felt very similarly
about it, but the more I thought about it... (loud gunshot) If we take this scene at face value -- yes this is quite bloody and gory -- but if you hold it right next to the stuff we're being exposed to in so many
violent-by-default action games out there -- this scene might actually be considered
somewhat tame in comparison. And yeah, not all of the scenes
shown were actually headshots, but the point is that this scene here in Paratopic is made to be visceral and shocking,
no matter where you place your shot. Through the way the game continuously
played and toyed with the expectations of the player, with how Paratopic stalled this moment
for nearly 80% of its playtime -- non-violent playtime -- until it finally delivered this
Sudden Peak Ultraviolence the jarring contrast makes it stand out as something that *feels* so much more
visceral and gnarly than it actually is. In a Call of Duty, you kill hundreds,
if not thousands of people over the course of a mere couple of hours and you won't even bat an eyelash, no matter how much calculated controversy
they conjure up with each time. In Paratopic, you fire one shot, take one life and it sticks with you. (muffled gunshot) This deliberate set-up of a
non-violent audience-expectation over a huge part of the playtime only to contrast it with
sudden peak ultraviolence is a trope that I've noticed before - not so much in video games though, but in movies. There are a handful of films I’ve notices
that have used this to great effect. Little to no violence over a long stretch
of time - no "appetizers" to acclimatize the audience, only insinuation... at max – and then amping it up in one instant
to a sudden display of intensely graphic brutality. (loud gunshot, glass clirring) It gives violence as a stylistic device purpose
and weight, making it feel genuinely shocking and traumatizing. Because one thing I had noticed about Paratopic is that when I was thinking about it,
when writing about it, when... uh... overanalyzing it (chuckles) – I tended to far more often compare it to films,
rather than to other video games. It is an interactive, dynamic story that can only be told like this
in video game form, yet much of its narrative language and many of the most notable stylistic devices it uses makes me immediately think
of renowned film directors rather than video game contemporaries. Aside from the use of the aforementioned
sudden peak ultraviolence trope - one of the most striking examples
is probably the way it employs “jump cuts”. It's not that other games don't use Jump-cuts, but especially first person games have the
tendency to either bridge different scenes - sometimes out of technical necessity - with more or less clever loading screens, or use various different types of more gamey,
seamless or smart transitions to ease the narrative from scene to scene. But Paratopic goes a completely different
route by using these strikingly jarring jump-cuts that so abruptly tear you from one moment
to the next without any transition, loading screen, build-up or any other contextual help that you’ll always need a moment
to orient yourself right after it, to grasp what the hell is even happening. One moment you're steering your car along
the highway and one split second later you're standing
in a gas station. It's like someone snapping a finger in front
of your face to wake you up from spacing out. (snap) This is... eerily similar to
how living with ADHD can feel at times. Just saying. (snap) How did I get here!? This storytelling style creates the feeling
that the scenes of striking mundanity we experience in Paratopic are the character's
moments *between* their actual conscious awareness. What we're doing feels like
the unimportant stuff that the brain decides to flush
out of the short term memory. Waiting for an elevator. Snippets of unimportant chit-chat
that our minds compartmentalize. (unintelligible, distorted speech) Long stretches of eventless walking. And a looot of driving. (unintelligible radio-talk) The voice-acting in Paratopic sounds like
gibberish - but it's not complete nonsense, if you listen closely you can hear that it has the phonetic silhouette
of actual spoken English. (unintelligible radio-talk) But it's shapeless. It sounds like... a conversation
that you don't actually pay attention to. People talking on the radio
while you're spacing out during the drive. All these things give Paratopic a -- I wouldn't exactly call it "dreamlike" -- but a liminal quality. As if you're dropped in someone else’s distorted, incomplete comprehension of their journey through the liminal spaces
between the moments of wakeful clarity. I’ve often seen this game described as "Lynchian" - so.. resembling the surreal, fever-dream-like
atmosphere of David Lynch movies. Aside from the more obvious beats - the Diner that feels like a
PS1 adaptation of Winkie's or the looming backdrop of
suffocating industrial decay that could be straight out of Eraserhead, the comparisons are mostly drawn
for the game’s noticeably “cinematic” feel that evokes similar emotions and feelings
of disorientation and confusion as the works of directors like David Lynch; messing with the audience's concepts
of strange and familiar, dreamlike and surreal, while at the same time grounded
in comfort and mundanity. Lynch has a tendency to focus more
on how a scene "feels" over spelling out what really happens
for narrative cohesion. - [Woodsman] Got a Light? - [Ragnar] I've been a fan of David Lynch's work for most of my life, and yet -
as much as I see the parallels, I’ve felt that the using the attribute Lynchian to describe Paratopic's unique rhythm, pacing,
atmosphere and... narrative texture does the game a great disservice. It gives off the vibe that it’s merely a
wanna-be-Lynch impostor game. When it is so much more. Because despite being woven
from a similar cloth, Paratopic establishes its own unique
narrative style and presentation that effortlessly stands on its own two feet. If you want to play the compare-game, you can easily see similarities to
many other works of revered idiosyncratic auteur-type filmmakers. For instance, I felt a similarly strong resemblance to the brooding, minimalist works of Jim Jarmusch when it comes to how Paratopic
delivers its story – eschewing traditional narrative structure, lacking clear story progression and focusing heavily on
mood and character development. An Assassin as one of the pivotal characters
is already peak Jarmusch -- but instead of turning it into an action romp that focuses on the glorified, borderline
pornographic mise-en-scnène of The Murdering -- Jarmusch’s character portraits are, just like Paratopic, almost obsessed with
everything but the immediate action, the moments of peak intensity. And that’s not just for Assassins - Jarmusch has a penchant to
deviate focus on the mundane, the common, everyday things
we often don't pay much attention to. The impressions our short-term-memory
usually flushes into the aether. Jarmusch frames them in a way
that emphasises their unique beauty. And Paratopic has a similar obsession with the things other films and games
don’t pay attention to when telling a story. I've heard people criticize the game
for featuring 3 multiple-minute long segments exclusively having the player ride along the
highway, with no traditional gameplay challenges. Just driving. Which, in light of the short length of the
game, accounts to probably 10%
or even more of the whole playtime. But these segments have a profound point
in the narrative of the game. Paratopic – as its title already suggests – portraits the mundane, the boring, the liminal space between the moments of peak-intensity and focus. Yeah, all this made me think of Jarmusch's
films when playing Paratopic for the first time, but it's also very
different at the same time. You can equally find nods to Cronenberg for
sure (distorted noises) (suspenseful music playing) (gunshots) Kubrick? - damn, just listen to this... (Clockwork Orange Theme /
Funeral March for Queen Mary playing) (Carlos AM from Paratopic OST playing) – Tarkovsky? Oh boy, yes! Paratopic is literally a short story
about the concept of “The Zone”. (we’ll get to that) It is because this game is incredibly
strong and consistent in its theming. Every nut and bolt... means something -- or rather.. the whole setting is built so consistently that it *feels* like everything is there for
a reason. You’re never gonna know, and you don’t
have to. (gibberish distorted speech) And Paratopic, unlike all the
filmmaker-comparisons we’ve drawn, conjures its unique atmosphere
in an interactive medium. (unintelligible speech) It references, and expresses a deep fondness
for the art it draws inspiration from, but never outright imitates. To go full circle, perhaps the strongest
parallel I can draw to Lynch is that Paratopic is a game that, the more I replay it in order to
"finally make sense" of the things that I don’t yet fully grasp, the more uncertain I end up being about it. With each iteration it feels like
I'm getting less sure of what it actually means - or wants to say. I distinctly remember when I watched
Mulholland Drive for the first time with a friend, we discussed it for over an hour afterwards. We tried to make sense of its
confusing, labyrinthine plot and ended up so perplexed that we decided
to watch it a second time right away. And... well, we just ended up
being even more flabbergasted, felt like we understood even less and had even more unanswered questions lingering
than after the first viewing. It was... I admit, a rather
frustrating experience at the time. The reason for that is
that our minds were rigid, hyperfocused on finding
"the one true" explanation -- and that either didn't really exist, or... it was just never meant to be deciphered
unambiguously to begin with. It’s much better if you just...
vibe with it and don’t try to make sense of everything. It’s a mood. Paratopic works exactly like that. If you want to tear its story apart
with a crowbar and make sense of everything, seamlessly, you end up with the pieces scattered all over. In order to enjoy it, you have to meet it
on its own terms and find your own meaning. (distorted, reverberating sound) In recent years, I’ve developed a strange
relationship with retro aesthetics in media. Because it’s become almost unavoidable
ever since the Rise of Synthwave. Back in the days of Drive and Hotline Miami striking retro-visuals
and -acoustics in a game evoked an immediate holy shit wow effect. So much so that it has grown
into its own recognized subgenre. Media that makes use of nostalgia as a vector for emotional response in the audience still, more often than not, achieves this
initial rapture-effect with me - this immediate sensation of
longing for an undefined past, through a more or less specific combination
of omitted fidelity and style, appealing to a vague, hazy
recollection of “the good old days”. There are some cases though where a game does more than just superficially wow the audience with retro-aesthetics and that’s when their use is more than just
a convenient paint-over tool, but an essential part of its message. Paratopic is a perfect example for this -- because not only does it vaguely
resemble a PSX-style early-3D game era aesthetic, with its unfiltered pixelated textures, reduced color palette
and highly stylized low-poly models -- its aesthetics also strongly
underline its themes. The omission of fidelity in this game
works hand in hand with its metanarrative. Crystal clear high-resolution rendering
and millions and billions of polygons would actually work directly against
what it has to say. - [Fry] It’s got better resolution than
the real world! - [Leela] (sighs) - [Ragnar] There is the most obvious example, the game's central McGuffin: The VHS tapes. - [Neighbor] (distorted speech) - [Ragnar] Heavily desired contraband
data containers of unknown content that play a pivotal role in each character's
story arc. They're an artifact that evokes
feelings of nostalgia in the audience, but also the subject of everyone's obsession, capable of corrupting a person's
very essence from inside out. The VHS tape is a medium that we associate with a very specific type of
aesthetic and time. Once the most widespread
analogue video storage format, people who have lived through the
age of the Video Home System cassette are intuitively familiar with its
distinctive profile of low fidelity and distortion. And despite these attributes being
objective shortcomings of the medium, it haunts our perception of media
from beyond the grave, since we've grown to associate its
distinct aesthetic footprint as.... nostalgic. - [Gordon Cole] We are like the dreamer who
dreams... But who is the dreamer? And it’s satisfyingly full circle that the retro-aesthetic in Paratopic
is precisely used to portrait liminality, the impressions and experiences from the moments that our brains routinely flush into
the void because they're not pertinent. - [Lester] How do you log that non-pertinent? - [Presbo] No drug-talk? - [Ragnar] The way nostalgia functions is identical
to how we choose to remember - or not remember things. It’s no coincidence that we spend
so much time in this game in a car. 3 of the 17 scenes you play through are pretty much eventless driving
along an empty highway. You initially assume that you’re playing
as the smuggler, with the suitcase on the passenger’s seat – but when you look away for a while, the object miraculously switches
into the gun... or.. an empty seat. The time spent on roads and roadside stops is a liminal space that each of the characters
share with each other – and that each of the characters traverse
with the same attention to detail: virtually none. So in a sense their patchy recollection
of their time spent on the road is virtually identical. And so it doesn’t matter who we are
in each of the scenes. When you recall a scene from your childhood, your mind reconstructs a fragmented, distorted – and most importantly – incomplete version of the "real" moment from your past; and it fills in the blanks with... whatever it has available. (static whirring) Noise, emptiness, fragments of other memories and newer, more frequently
computed thought patterns to assemble a picture that *feels* complete. It’s strikingly low fidelity, but to our very own internal
language and thought frequency it feels complete enough
that we don't question its validity. Like an old cassette laden with magnetic noise, distortion and other digital pollution artifacts accumulated over years of attrition. And isn’t that precisely why this
fuzzy, idolized past keeps haunting us, induced by the deliberate use of
low-fidelity audio-visual effects? We're making things look bad on purpose
because it makes us feel... something. Retro games imitate the real
technical limitations of the time, made on modern engines for modern computers, designed to emulate the *feeling*
those relics from our past evoked in us. The collective unconscious of a generation
has been cultivated by the media we consumed. It shaped us, and influenced and altered our
perceptions, forever conditioning our thoughts and emotional
responses. (gizmo imitates car engine noises) I don’t have to have grown up in a rural,
US middle class neighborhood in the 80s in order for Stranger Things to make me feel like it’s a depiction of *my* childhood
as well in some form. We’ve been conditioned to feel nostalgic
for fabricated memories that aren’t our own. - [Deckard] Those aren’t your memories;
they’re somebody else’s. Okay... bad joke. I made a bad joke, you’re not a replicant. Go home, okay? (somber electronic music playing) And isn't this theme of whitewashing one’s
memories through the soft-focus-lens of nostalgia perfectly in line with the game's setting? Paratopic's architectural backdrop is painted with the greys, browns and rust-reds that embody the post-industrial sacrifice-zones of huge swathes of a forgotten America that’s been left to rot during the
past decades of economic recession. It's a refreshingly unspent setting for a
video game: Melancholy Rust Belt Blues. Paratopic’s all-but-in-name I94 leads us past the de-industrialized ruins of a once-thriving, hubristic economy that was abandoned for cheaper alternatives in more profitably exploitably exploitable
regions across the globe. Hollowed out factories, decommissioned refineries, broken-down pipelines, and sheer neverending scenery
drawn from a canvas of structural vulnerability are the very essence of the idea of... The Zone. (NIN - The Wretched playing) Huge areas of dilapidation are the silent
witnesses to the sophomoric prosperity of days gone. It's a dark mirror held up to the people
struggling through economic despair today, reminding us just how much better
previous generations had it - generations whose sense of altruism withered
by the excess of yesteryear, who had theirs, and who now look down on us with unsympathetic contempt for not achieving the same with the significantly
inferior hand we’ve been dealt. It was a completely different playing field
back in the boomer days, wasn’t it? Far more stacked in the common man's favor to a degree that’s highly unlikely
to ever return. And to be clear, this is not just
due to mere whims of fate, but the result of cold and
calculated political decisions made during the Reagan-Thatcher-era
of deregulation-mania. It’s those policies and the frenzy of
outsourcing labor to foreign countries that foreseeably transformed the booming Midwest into an economic - and architectural rust-bowl. As far west as Milwaukee and as far east as
Buffalo, the zone stretches across the map
like geographic eczema. Yet at the same time -- while unemployment, homelessness and an irredeemable lack of perspective and
opportunity is the fabric of those forgotten zones -- not just exclusive to the US -- gleefully reflected back at those who didn't, or couldn’t abandon the sinking ship
in the decades of continuous economic collapse -- those proverbial chalk outlines on the pavement have accrued their own peculiar
flavor of nostalgia. The rough and gritty charm
of post-industrial urban regions has, over time, evolved into a
banner of a romanticized cultural identity. It's a dichotomy: the bittersweet reminiscence
of the golden days, a dollop of denial of economic realities and a seething resentment of the
decaying architectural residue our ancestors have left us with turned into an object of
idolized cultural pride. Just like video cassettes preserve
filtered and heavily distorted information that, when reflected back at us, evoke thoughts,
memories and emotions, those dilapidated wastelands tell a
distorted and abridged tale of bygone times. The scenery is the medium,
nostalgia the playback device. Paratopic's world is everything but inviting. It’s a decayed, abandoned husk where just looking at things makes you feel sickly -- and yet... it emits an uncanny allure. The fascinating ambiguity that makes
the idea of The Zone so tantalizing: A place that radiates hopelessness,
apathy and soul-crushing despair - yet you feel strangely drawn to it at the
same time. (trolley braking noisily) (Сталкер Soundtrack - Поезд playing) The Progenitor of the concept of The Zone is the 1972 Strugatzki-novel Roadside Picnic, which revolved around areas across the globe where inexplicable phenomena
and bizarre anomalies that defy our understanding
of nature and science occur in the aftermath of a
cataclysmic event known as “The Visitation”. Scientists and thinkers worldwide compete to come up with the most sound explanation for the paranormal nature of these zones. One of the leading hypotheses is that a highly advanced intergalactic
spacefaring civilization simply used our planet to discard waste-material during their trek across the galaxy. We were, for them, nothing but
a convenient litter bin to discard by-products of a technology
lightyears ahead of human comprehension. Like junk that was mindlessly tossed
by a group of hikers during a... roadside Roadside Picnic. With humans being like little insects
stumbling over it, but completely lacking the means and intelligence to even remotely comprehend
what they’re finding. Andrei Tarkovsky adapted the book
7 years later into his seminal movie “Stalker”, which is a somewhatliberal interpretation
of the source material. For one in that it is much more vague about the nature and the origin of The Zone that the three deuteragonists of the film venture into with the goal
of fulfilling their innermost desires. Especially the film, with its long, brooding and melancholic shots of a
post-civilization landscape reclaimed by the Ur-forces of nature, was, in hindsight, often considered
to have been uncannily prescient - since many people felt that it predicted the scenario of the forsaken zone
around Chernobyl’s reactor after the nuclear disaster
in the Ukraine in 1986. A living example of a region of true
post-apocalypse, right here on earth, brought about by the collapse of human ingenuity. It is hard to look at shots and footage
from the zone around the reactor even today and not think about Stalker’s haunting imagery. But the question should really not be “How could they predict Chernobyl??”, because all it needed was a keen-eyed look
at the world in its current state. The superpowers of the world
had been continuously racing for global dominance on every front, colonizing, exploiting and depleting
every available resource with complete indifference towards the
obvious and often-admonished long-term consequences. A cancerous expansion-mania devoured the world in pursuit of power and supremacy
over the “opponent”, fueled by a hubristic faith in the infallibility of human ingenuity and scientific rationality. "Scientism" became the dominant
denomination of the post-war era. If we produce the smartest minds, uncover all the right data, get all the right equations in place and plug all the right values in our spreadsheets, we can achieve everything, become anything, conquer the world and the stars and nothing will stand in our way. In 1979, it was only a matter of time until a Chernobyl would emerge for real somewhere in the world for everyone to behold. Led by delusions of grandeur the powers that be continuously tapped
into ever greater forces so fickle, so fundamentally untamable that it’s a borderline miracle
the world is still in one piece even today. Because everyone would rather see
the world in ruins than see the other win. The emergence of such Zones of Post-Civilization
was an entirely predictable foresight. And this lust to subjugate the world
had infected everyone – it was not tied to either soviet-style socialism
or western-style capitalist expansionism. Paratopic takes place in exactly such a zone - a remnant, no, a ruin of
post-industrialist hubris, one where things beyond our understanding
can happen at any moment - equally spawned by the by-products of a truly indifferent faction
as depicted in Roadside Picnic. But unlike in the Strugatzki-novel this Zone hasn’t drawn
worldwide attention to itself. Paratopic’s Zone is forgotten and abandoned. Every aspect of it purposefully
discarded in plain sight – including the people who still inhabit it. Not by some *extra*terrestrial
colonizing force as local folklore insinuates, but by the exact powers that initially erected the industrial hulks that are now rotting and decaying on the roadsides. The once sprawling cities that now fall apart because their value for expansionism
has long desiccated. No... it was done by the unquenchable greed of a very *ter*restrial colonizing force. It has infested and corroded the land, and like ambulant dandelions, no matter how many heads you chop off, the roots are still underground,
waiting to spring up again. But this is about more than just the
corporate greed of industrial capitalism indifferently discarding a
hollowed out husk to rot – the zone portrayed in Paratopic is,
in many ways, a depiction of the
Western-imperialist flip side of Sovier-Era wastelands foretold
in Roadside Picnic and Stalker. This game takes place in one of the many zones that really, truly exist, today in our world. And in this game, you unveil
a tiny sliver of it by “Borrowing” into the dreamlike,
liminal, half-lucid minds of our clueless cadre of contemporary witnesses. *This* is where the unexplained, the things that defy our understanding
of science and rationalism, the paranormal, takes place:
down in the subconscious the moments between the wakeful clarity where all our biases and preconceptions thwart us from seeing things how they really
are. In many ways these areas of post-expansionism are our postmodern equivalent
to the magic realms of old legends, places where logic is not the end-all be-all, and where magic still very much a reality. They’re not unclaimed by man,
but rather reclaimed by nature; a by-product of this scientistic
megalomania of our ancestors. The proverbial sins of the fathers. Mindlessly discarded like... litter
during a picnic on the side of the road. The Zone is a place where the tranquillizing scientific oversaturation
of our modern civilization has been shattered back into its atoms, put in its place by ancient, unconquered Ur-forces far beyond our comprehension. A place where “man is still humble”. The perpetually shapeshifting,
ephemeral nature of The Zone equates to decayed industrial wastelands and places that nature has reclaimed
in its divine mercilessness. This brutal contrast between
creation and entropy these places embody, emits an aura that is in itself phantomic, and removed from the man-made,
icarian reality of the "glorious" past. Because even though these Zone-ish
landscapes are irreparably destroyed, they nevertheless retain a tantalizing
kind of mystery that appeals precisely because of their inscrutability. It feels like anything, good or bad, could be waiting for you
once you scratch the surface. A place where the magical,
the supernatural, and the weird, are untouched by the gravity
of our logic-driven, rational civilization. And that is ultimately why everyone
is so maniacally obsessed with those tapes, and why they’re highly controlled contraband
in the world of Paratopic: because they provide a tiny glimpse
into a forgotten reality that’s unhinged from the bias of our hard and rigid,
hyper-normalized civilization. It’s a primordial yearning for
mystery and fulfillment that’s rooted deep within the human heart; the very reason we're so enchanted by the surreal magic of scanlines
and magnetic aberrations of a... VHS cassette. (static getting louder) (TV off sound) Hey wow this was... this sure was
a journey, wasn’t it. I mean yeah that’s why I called it “A Journey Through Paratopic”, makes sense. One thing that makes this, um, subseries of videos so special to me is they really take me, the creator, on a journey as well while writing them. I’ve done this for 2 games before, The Void and Rule of Rose, and the special rule about
my approach with them is that I write each chapter individually, or sometimes 1 or 2 chapters, and edit them before I move on
to the next one. So while I may have a rough idea, I don’t really know where it’s going, and where I’ll end up with the final chapter
when I’m working on the first ones. It makes for a very different
tone and feel in direction, not just in that they tend to get
quite long, obviously but also in that they talk more about a game than talk over it; like how I would sit down with a friend
and talk about a game and we’d end up in places we have no idea when we start the conversation. Taking a game as a jumping off point but just letting the current carry me
wherever it takes me. I’m very fond of this process and I personally always end up enjoying
these “Journey Through” videos a lot once I’m finished with them, but they also feel so strange and vastly different than most of the thing I make that I’m always quite nervous
when it comes to releasing one of them. So in that sense, thank you so much for watching an entire hour of this.... meditation on Paratopic that for some reason again ended up,
once again, in an ad-hoc dissection of Stalker. It’s kind-of becoming a thing now I feel. I’d really love to do this format more often, given the interest is there – and I’ve got one lined up that I’m
already working on: which is a game that I’ve been
meaning to cover for a very long time because it’s utterly
brilliant; and that's – while we’re at it –
also very much a contender for The Zone narratives
in video games: The Polish Indie Horror masterpiece “Darkwood” I don’t yet know if it’ll be
the next video or some time after that, because yeah, the “Journey Through” writing
process is lengthy and takes a lot of time. So you’ll just have to stay tuned for now!
:) Now, a few videos ago I shared with you guys a little bit of an overview where
the channel is actually standing at the moment and what goals I’m working towards. And why I had, at the time, for instance, decided to take on sponsorships, which, you can see, is certainly not
a guaranteed recurring thing. This video didn’t have a sponsor
and the last one didn’t... Not that there aren’t any offers,
there’s always plenty but getting brands that
I’m actually comfortable with and willing to endorse with a good conscience is a whole other thing. I really don’t want to abuse the trust
of my audience in this regard. The point is Sponsorships... helped. especially when it comes to being able to
properly pay the people I work with when making these videos. I wouldn’t feel nearly as good
about the final result of this video for instance if it weren’t for the great work of
my copy-editor Matt – who spent a lot of time polishing the shit
I came up with. As it stands at this point, the crowdfunding support on Patreon is the main and most important
financial foundation of this channel. Sponsorships are rather unreliable and more to be considered a bonus
when it works out, but nothing I’d build a house on, and YouTube’s ad-revenue... well Jesus, you probably noticed how
in the recent year, you’d get constantly bombarded with
double-ads all the time, how the ad-density on YouTube
has drastically increased? One might think that this would mean that creators also get vastly better paid, but (sigh) of course that hasn’t happened
in the slightest. The ads have quadrupled, yet the creator’s cuts have -
have not seen a significant increase at all. Anyway, I’m digressing: My point is, Patreon is still, and will remain, de facto the most important source of income for this
channel, and also like for me to pay rent and food and software and electricity and all. Like, y’know, the foundation... We’ve recently reached a very important
milestone, which is... absolutely wonderful, I’m really thankful for everyone’s support! And currently I’m aiming to reach probably
the most important milestone where it would enable me to work far more together with other people. Which is exactly the one path
I’d want to take in order to produce *more* content on this channel, without sacrificing any quality. Actually probably even quite the opposite. We’re Nearly 70% there, so if you want
to join and to help out as well, and in general support the stability
of my work with this channel, then please hop over to Patreon and pitch
in as well. It’s very much appreciated in
these unstable times. And for this video, I’d like to give out a special thank you to these top-tier supporters: (www.patreon.com/RagnarRoxShow/) Until next time, ta ta!
