I thought Paratopic would be right up my alley because I enjoy weird games that use non linear storytelling and frequent point of view shifts such as Gravity Bone; Thirty Flights of Loving; and Virginia. Things started off great as I was getting into the story and atmosphere. The game uses a lot of what I would describe as “filler” though. For instance there are couple sequences where youI thought Paratopic would be right up my alley because I enjoy weird games that use non linear storytelling and frequent point of view shifts such as Gravity Bone; Thirty Flights of Loving; and Virginia. Things started off great as I was getting into the story and atmosphere. The game uses a lot of what I would describe as “filler” though. For instance there are couple sequences where you are driving a car. Just driving a car. It is incredibly detailed mind you, you can steer, accelerate/decelerate; turn on the radio; change stations but the sequence is just that: driving with no purpose or anything going on. There is also a section in the woods that while it provides significant plot importance the few minutes leading up to that are just walking there with nothing happening. When a game is short to begin with wasting precious minutes with nothing going on is a bad idea. This is where the above games shined was that they made every moment, of their short run times, count. This aside I loved the story of Paratopic and the atmosphere. It was a blend of creepy and dystopian with a hint of humour. The graphics were poor though, no beating around the bush. I don’t care if this is the PSX style or not. If you don’t want to make graphics with good detail then you better work on a good art style but Paratopic had neither. Everything is blurry and low poly. The music was good and well used though.
I played Paratopic on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any bugs or spelling mistakes. There is no save system at all but the game is short. Alt-Tab didn’t work. There is an FOV slider that goes from 65-105 although above 85 it looks a bit weird and the game does warn about this. There are no other graphics options.
Game Engine: Unity
Save System: None
Disk Space Used: 404MB
Settings Used: 1080P and 85 FOV
GPU Usage: 8-33 %
VRAM Usage: 593-766 MB
CPU Usage: 4-16 %
RAM Usage: 2.4-2.5 GB
Frame Rate: 139-144 FPS
As I said I tried to enjoy Paratopic. I thought it did a lot of things well but it also wasted my time and had terrible graphics. There are worse games out there but also much better. I paid $8.99 USD for the game and finished it in 39 minutes which I felt was fair value despite my issues with it.
My Score: 6.5/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.0.2 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 21.0.2 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.11.14-1-MANJARO… Expand
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