Paratopic is the purest bit of rot you’ll ever play.

I don’t blame anyone for not enjoying Paratopic. Even amongst those who play games for their artistic merit, Paratopic is sludge. And if you play games just for fun or entertainment? The only game I know about that is more hostile toward that end is Cruelty Squad¹, and even that game understands satisfaction.

Paratopic understands nothing except for its own detritus. It does not grapple with themes or messages, but rather textures and smells. It does not engage with gameplay, nor really with narrative, but rather with the sense of unease, timeloss, and delirium that you get just before you get sick. Really sick.

And that is why I call it pure. Not in the typical definition of the word, meaning innocent or clean, but in the sense that it is a raw distillation of what it explores. Paratopic unburdens itself by just embracing a kind of sludge-metal malaise that you couldn’t pierce with a knife (but might stick to it).

There is a story, sure, in the sense that things happen to characters, but those things that happen to characters — and those things that you do as them — are discordant and illogical, not neatly tied to one another. What story there is has been melted away by the acidity of the project, leaving scraps of something grand, going the way of all things: becoming dirt.

To call Paratopic slow or opaque is accurate, as many have, is a fair critique. And it is, indeed, that deliberate slowness that keeps it from perfect marks. There are segments that do cause one to verge into disinterest even during its short, 45-minute runtime, and not every moment communicates the sludge-feel that the best parts of the game manage to. For such a short game, the fact that there is still fat that could be cut to make it even more of a pure distillation is notable. But enough of the game still succeeds that it is still a triumph of low-poly rot horror.

However, to call Paratopic nasty, or even meanspirited, as many do, is to do it an injustice, and to pay it a compliment. That is not just the point, that is the only point. Paratopic is a mood piece, and it exists to deliver that mood like a head in a box.

And, between twisting textures, nonsense delivery, and a commitment to the unexplainably unsettling, Paratopic succeeds on every mark.

Paratopic is the body of something that once mattered, left to fester in the dark woods through many a summer week. And you, the player, guided by white noise and dead signals, are the one who gets to stumble across those remains, in a place so deep that you’ll never make it out on time.

Paratopic is not just art, it is a piece that perfectly distills a single thing. If you dare drink from that toxic waste, you can find the game on Steam here, and on Itch.io here. Also keep an eye out for Arbitrary Metric’s next game, Roman Sands RE:Build; a mood piece of a different tone, it holds high promise.

1. Consumer Softproducts. Cruelty Squad. Consumer Softproducts. PC. 2021.