Hellu, today ve are taking a luk at Paradigm, a fanni adventure game from very small Asutrayan studio, If you jave net noticed yet, da am speking in Russian accent, becasue Paradigm is viry gud, and I hev been very caught up with yit.
You are Paradigm, a heavily-mutated musician living in the post-USSR country of Krusv – a nation whose main purpose is to store the world’s radioactive waste. One morning, while you try and make some ‘phat beatsies’ on your computer, you find out that your PC has been corrupted. Now, living in an active power station has many benefits, but one problem is that if your computer has a problem then the power station has a problem. And, if a power station sitting on top of all of the world’s radioactive waste has a problem, the world has a problem.
To save the world, and more importantly your ‘phat beets,’ you must travel the length of this weird and strange world to find the restoration floppy disk. It was never going to be plain sailing though; a large sloth with Donald Trump’s toupee (and some form of daddy issues), as well as the dangerous space dust, the drug of choice in Krusv, will hinder what should be a simple journey.
The carefully-crafted graphics have that delicious, hand-drawn look which is hard not to love These only serve to make the absurd setting the game inhabits more amazing. It also manages to empower the,what are now certainly well-worn, controls and interfaces of traditional point and click/graphic adventure games. For every single object in the scene, you have the option of looking at it, using it, picking it up, or talking to it, which normally ends up with me falling out of my chair because every single line of dialogue in this game feels like 24-carat comedy gold. Paradigm is what I would consider a perfect length, building a vibrant and comedically stupid world while not getting too bogged down in itself.
Paradigm’s story appears simple at first, however this is deceptive – the story starts as the simple quest to repair your home computer, however it quickly descends into a satisfyingly complex narrative. The deeper narrative is about your past as a ‘Prodigy Child’ – a result of a government sponsored project to ‘fix’ children; changing them to ensure that they grow up as famous athletes, competent doctors, or EVEN top doggos. It’s this tampering with genetics which has resulted in your resembling of a foot covered in a particularly nasty outbreak of boils.
Now, some people might say that the point and click adventure genre has been overdone, and that it was one of the first genres of video games for a reason, and even that I’m a big nerd. And you know what I say to them?
Complete twaddle! (except for that last part, that hurts) I challenge you to find a click and point, nae, a video game with such a keen sense of humour as Paradigm. This humour doesn’t just inhabit the game, it starts before the game itself. When you start a game, you have the choice of a normal tutorial, or a dog tutorial. Choosing the dog tutorial will give you a 5 second clip of an adorable Labrador sitting at an old CRT screen. For crying out loud, your helpful and ever loyal companion is a sentient tumour on top of your head! Paradigm knows exactly what it wants to do, and it does it well.
To give you another example of Paradigm’s amazingly sharp wit, early on in the game you encounter a small statue of a tentacle with 3 sucker cups attached to it. Now, many will recognise this as a direct reference to Day of the Tentacle, and Paradigm takes this and runs with it. Looking at it, our brave hero will regale you with the tale of how these statues are ancient artifacts from the “Copyrightus Infringement” era, unearthed from the ground. All the archaeologists who discovered these artifacts quickly succumbed to the terrible case of ‘cease and desist’. And of course, you cannot pick up or use these artifacts, because if that happens LucasArts is going to come and take all the candy. Paradigm doesn’t just break the 4th wall for a cheap joke, or shock value, it exists without it to enhance and amplify all of the jokes it makes.
While point and clicks are not my forte, Paradigm is intuitive, with different difficulty for experienced and new players. If you ever have a problem, you can just ask the ‘Slightly-better-than-average-intuition-about-everything” tumour for a hand, or to give you a complete walk through. Every character shines bright, and it’s hard for me to pick a favourite, with the likes of a talking computer with an Aussie accent who just wants to get it on with the emergency warning computer, or the beat-boxing eggplant you continually harass for rent money.
Paradigm humor is fairly adult, which, when coupled with the absurdist humor, makes this one of the most enjoyable games I’ve ever played, and one I will be talking about for a long time. Paradigm manages to marry its light, political comedy with the crazy and ridiculous world contained inside.
