The pair pointed me towards Psygnosis’ PSone
thriller Sentient’s freaky faces and the boundary-
pushing visuals of The Terminator: Future Shock
as key pieces of inspiration when making the
game. But while Paratopic’s visuals might hark
back to the PlayStation’s prime, its design is
a straight reaction to more recent trends.
Arbitrary Metric chose to use a retro aesthetic
to frame a particularly sharp take on walking
simulators – non-violent first-person games that
forgo mechanics to focus on narrative.
“Ages ago,” says Burford, “I [told a friend] I
didn’t enjoy walking sims, who challenged me to
play some more. That got me thinking about why
walking sims don’t appeal to me, and how I’d
design a walking sim [that did].”
Filtering Paratopic through a retro 3D lens
wasn’t just a personal preference, either. With
unsettled lines and blurred textures, games of
this kind feel as detached from time and space
as the desolate locales that surround Burford
and Harvey in the United States.
“From an outsider perspective, these parts
of the States are existentially uncomfortable,”
explains Harvey, who moved to the US five years
ago. “Especially coming from the UK, a world
where continuity gets taken for granted. People
and events just flit through without leaving any
kind of mark or permanence.”
Burford, who lives in Kansas, agrees. “Getting
that sense of space, of going to a gas station at
3 am and talking to a guy who’s lonely and bored
and desperate for company. Knowing a serial
killer and understanding that the reason I came
to know him was because he was scoping me
and my family out.” (See the boxout bottom left
for more on this startling incident.)POINT OF VIEW
You might have noticed a trend in the games
mentioned so far. Almost without exception,
Horrorshow, Hackett, Harvey, and Burford
are largely working in the first-person horror
mode popularised by more recent games like
Amnesia and Outlast. First-person games weren’t
unheard of in the PlayStation era, but the most
seminal titles of the nineties were viewed from
a third-person perspective: Resident Evil and
Silent Hill pulled off their scares with a controlled
approach to camera placement. This summer’s
industrial horror-themed Haunted PS1 jam
is packed with games that go for a similarly
remote viewpoint. Some, like redactionary’sArbitrary Metric’s 2018 fever dream Paratopic,
she describes how the inherent “jankiness”
and the industry’s embryonic state combined
to create what she describes as “hauntological
emotive connections for anyone that got to see
a glimpse of things back then.”
Like Hackett and Horrorshow, Harvey also
made her start creating smaller projects that
explored where she could take the low-poly
style. “I’d got a bunch of nineties-looking
retro 3D jank experiments I’d been regularly
revisiting,” she explains. “Nothing particularly
spectacular, just exploratory work – what you
can do with grime, how to drive things in an
impressionist direction, experiments with
composition, and so on. What Doc brought me
felt like an opportunity to put into practice what
I’d been itching to try out with this.”
That’s writer and game designer Doc Burford,
who pitched the idea of an ‘anti-walking sim’
to Harvey in late 2017. Together with eventual
IGF winner Chris I Brown, the three pitched
Paratopic as an episodic series before focusing
the project into a single release. Something tells me this man
isn’t your friend. It’s the highly
unsettling Paratopic.
Bucher’s Two Atmospheric
Atrocities, uses grainy
photographs as backdrops.
MEETING A MURDERER
In an interview with Into The Spine, Doc Burford elaborated further on his
encounter with a serial killer, which took place around the year 2003. “There was
this one time where animal control came to the house,” Burford told the website.
“He told us that people had been calling because we were abusing our chickens.
Of course, we weren’t, as he was quick to point out, but he had to stop by. He was
friendly and outgoing, but he had to stop by every few weeks ‘cause someone was
making calls. Dad and Mom liked him because he was a church-going Boy Scout
leader. Seemed like a great guy.” As it turned out, the visitor was Dennis Rader,
better known as the BTK Killer, who’d murdered ten people in Kansas between
1974 and 1991 before his eventual arrest in 2005. “BTK had been telling people
he had his sights on a new target,” Burford said. “I was told later that it was
my family, which is why he’d been finding excuses to visit.” The incident would
eventually inform several moments in Paratopic. Lost in the Backrooms by Jam is a
procedurally generated take on
modern internet folklore.20 / wfmag.cc
Fright-teen-ninety-nineInterface