Indie video game horror has enjoyed a favorable rise in recent years, and while there’s a flood of titles trying to capture what the last big indie horror hit did, the real stars have come from those willing to get a bit more experimental with things. The developer of Paratopic, Arbitrary Metric, has certainly embraced that. With this short dose of surreal adventure, this small team has mixed the nostalgia value of late 90’s 3D visuals and Lynchian oddness with a dash of subversion to the use of retro-inspired visuals. This Definitive Cut released on Steam adds just a little more of that to the mix.

To say too much much about the story of Paratopic would do the game a disservice, but what can be said is it involves a dark, empty version of reality, the smuggling of some mysterious and sinister videotapes, an assassin on the hunt for their target, and the discovery of a strange abandoned facility in the woods. The who and the why of it is cloaked in secrecy for much of the time, adding to the murky mystery and uncertainty provided by Paratopic’s ominous atmosphere.

During the 50-odd minutes Paratopic takes to complete, you almost never get the chance to feel comfortable in its strangely off-kilter version of reality. Jump cuts, garbled speech, and unexplained sights pepper its brief presence. Some of this ties together when all is said and done, giving the second playthrough some added depth. Elsewhere you can make conversation and take actions that don’t appear to have any purpose, but that’s so very fitting in this almost alien world where making sense of it all is not a top priority.

The story is told via a series of vignettes where most of the narrative action is. They are padded out with sections where you drive your car along the bleak highways, listening to the drone of talk radio or an almost mournful song. These segments let you unpack the events of the previous scene whilst surveying the haunting emptiness of the outside world. You don’t do too much in these parts, save for a bit of radio fiddling (if you wish) and gently steering the car away from the roadside, yet they are generally excellent in how they make the most of their limited nature.

They can go on for a bit too long though, threatening to reveal themselves as mere padding to the game’s overall length. It does just about swerve onto the right side of the artistic choice highway, as the overall tone and pacing of Paratopic allows for such indulgences.

During the vignettes, you really see how Paratopic uses its lo-fi feel to drive home its general unpleasant and uncomfortable atmosphere. The 90’s style 3D visuals bring a scuzziness befitting of this broken world. You’d think a game relying on looking like a first-person version of the original Resident Evil would be a terrible idea, but there’s a kind of haunted beauty to the way Arbitrary Metric has applied it to Paratopic. Whether that’s the landscapes or the people of this world.

For instance, on the rare occasion you meet another human being, their stretched texture faces are painfully reminiscent of many 3D efforts of that era of gaming, and Arbitrary Metric not only knows this, it uses this to make interactions that little bit more unsettling, especially when paired with the intentionally garbled voice work and the fan

The conversations you have are of the multiple choice variety, with your character able to crack a joke or mock the absurdity of the topic at hand should you see fit. There’s plenty of cryptic chatter, (the gas station attendant is especially high on it among his stories of mysterious giant balls of twine) and little aural nudges towards the greater scope of this story. There’s an unspoken lore to this world, seen in fleeting glimpses on the highways or in the run-down buildings of the wider world. There’s not a whole lot to interact with that helps divulge any useful information on the reason behind this grim place, but even in this grungy 90’s 3D aesthetic, you can speculate plenty from what you see and hear.

There’s some mild exploration of the game’s environments. It’s fairly limited and on a couple of occasions it’s not made all that clear what you’re supposed to be doing, but as per everything else in Paratopic, the general brevity and direction means its not a major annoyance, just a sliver of bloat that could arguably be reduced with some extra fine-tuning.

Despite its short play time, Paratopic does deserve a second playthrough. There are things you don’t discover or do depending on the choices you make, and it really helps flesh out the world-building. At a glance, it might seem rather lacking in substance given that sub-one hour playthrough time, but there’s a hidden depth to Paratopic’s compressed story. Sure, it’s quite ambiguous and somewhat speculative, but it is there and it is effectively done.

Paratopic is a brief trip through an unnerving twist on reality and it admirably packs in so much atmosphere and mystery into that diminutive framework. The most telling sign of its quality is in how its scuzzy psychological creepiness stays with you, whether you like it or not.

Review code provided by the publisher.

Paratopic: Definitive Cut is out now on itch.io and Steam.