When We Made

Paradise Killer

actually look at you. And even with that little bit of work, with the help of the animation and really smart designers and engineers, with everybody working together, you could tell from the very beginning that she was a character that people would really gravitate Chris Wallace takes a look behind the scenes toward.” of Paradise Killer, a surreal murder mystery

Quill really becomes a fully fleshed out character with that takes inspiration from its predecessors to the help of the game’s strong world-building. As an create something truly uniqueinterloper in Quill’s world, the player experiences it not through her eyes, but as an observer watching as she lives her life in her familiar setting. It’s a strangely intimate feeling, and one which gives way to joint apprehension as both the player and Quill enter new, unfamiliar areas. “When you go through Mousetown and you see Quill run through there and you see that she has a hometown, the feeling of her leaving it, of that town maybe being in danger, gives you more of a bond,” Alderson says. “If Paradise Killer, the first title from Kaizen Game Works, is a game that immediately invites comparisons to other titles, and yet somehow that part was left out, you wouldn’t feel like there was feels entirely unique at the same time. much to fight for. Everything that we’ve done, the mood With its island setting, and a murder-mystery settings, taking Quill from one area to the next and letting plotline populated by out of this world characters, the you rest and take in this environment… It’s all supposed immediate comparison is to Danganronpa series, or the to exaggerate and accentuate that mood that you’re Phoenix Wright games to a lesser extent – particularly feeling. It all ties back into how you are connecting with in the game’s final trial, where the player is tasked to Above: Phil Crabtree, Quill and her world.” explain whodunnit. technical director But this familiar groundwork does nothing to help the SAME QUESTION EIGHT WAYS player get a foothold in this bizarre world. Paradise Killer Collaboration was key during the development of Moss, is an open-world murder mystery game, yes. But it’s a not just within the team itself, but with the help of external weird one – profoundly and gloriously strange – filled with playtesters. People were often brought in to feedback on mysterious goat gods, human sacrifice and the warm mechanical arms of a sexpot called Dr Doom Jazz. The player steps into the shoes of Lady Love Dies, who is recalled from a three million day-exile from Paradise Island for one last job. Paradise’s ruling council have been massacred, and it’s Lady Love Dies’ job to find out how. It’s... certainly a lot to take in. But much like the Above: Oli Clarke, mysterious murder at the game’s core, the world around creative director it is also best left to be experienced than explained.

the game and asked questions about their experience – even if most of these questions were actually very similar.

“External playtests were mostly about ‘Okay, how do people feel when they play? Do they like it or not like it?’,” Alderson explains. “At the end of playtest we would ask the same question eight different ways. The question is really ‘What didn’t you like?’, but we would ask it differently: ‘What pulled you out of the experience? What took you out of the headset? If there’s one thing you could change what would it be? If you had two weeks to finish the game, what would be the thing that you’d fix?’

“Those help bring a playtester into their comfort zone, because no one wants to play something that people put a lot of care and love into and then turn around and say ‘This is what I didn’t like about it’. So it takes a little while EXPERIENCE, DON’T TELL to get the playtester comfortable, and we found that Paradise Killer may wear its influences on its sleeve, finding different ways to ask the same question means but it’s not afraid to break with the traditions left by its you eventually get the really good stuff after the fourth or predecessors and move in a new direction. fifth time you ask it.As technical director Phil Crabtree and creative “I don’t think anyone in our studio has ever made a director Oli Clarke Smith explain, the pair aimed to use game like this, so I think it’s important that you trust the both the genre’s history and their own experience in the process. You trust playtesting and you make sure that you industry to tell a new kind of detective story – making allow yourself some time and freedom to try something use of the game’s open world to give the player the and then keep going. Try something new and branch out, freedom to investigate however they wanted. but also use your experience from games that you’ve “The Danganronpa connection was definitely made before and you’ll be fine. As long as you’re having intentional,” Clarke Smith begins. “I love games like fun too! We enjoyed playing Moss throughout the entire Danganronpa, Flower, Sun and Rain and Silver Case. process and I think that really helps.” That was the kind of direction that I wanted to take it in.

“Both Phil and I are both very into very heavy worldbuilding games, and exploration based games. I’ve previously worked on Until Dawn, which is kind of a non-linear drama, but not as freeform and as open as we wanted to do with this.

“I thought: ‘there’s a different way of doing interactive stories. What if we just blow the whole thing wide open, and just let the player tackle it in any order under their own direction?’ I love Danganronpa, but it’s so linear, You go to a crime scene, and you’re only allowed to

leave once you’ve found every bit of evidence and you’ve spoken to every character. And then when you go to trial, if you don’t get the correct answer, you fail and retry it.

“So what we came to was: ‘what if we just don’t care about whether the player uncovers the whole truth? What if we just care that the players found something that is meaningful to them?’”

MAKE YOUR MIND UP

This break with the more linear storytelling of Danganronpa and Phoenix Wright was actually much more severe in early versions of the game. Originally, the game was never planned to reveal any truth behind the mystery at all, with the end-game trials being added much later to allow the player to decide how they think it all went down.

Still, this nonlinear approach was an important one to the team.

“We wanted people to ask themselves, ‘well, is this the right answer?’” adds Crabtree. “And then they’d go and talk to friends and other people playing the game, and they could all have a slightly different experience or a slightly different understanding. The player is tasked with solving a mysterious murder on Paradise Island

“We never wanted to force our beliefs and our stories on you. Make your own one up, there’s so much more power in the imagination. We provided you the framework to decide what happened, but you can interpret it how you want.”

To Crabtree and Clarke Smith, it was important to ensure that the player feels like a detective, and isn’t just pushing through to progress the story. It’s a point that makes Paradise Killer feel distinctly different to the more visual-novel style offerings of Phoenix Wright.

“We definitely wanted to make you feel like an investigator,” says Clarke Smith, “and allow you to jump to conclusions or let your own biases affect your view of the mystery, and let you fail by missing evidence or not getting the right testimony.”

This focus on finding the evidence, not just pushing through a story is behind one of the more interesting aspects of the game – You can begin the end-game trial whenever you like. But if you haven’t prepared your case, it’s not going to go well for you.

“We’re not asking you to jump through a hoop to progress the game,” Clarke Smith continues, “we’re asking you to feel confident enough that you’ve got enough evidence. So if you do make the logic leap early

The game’s character designs draw inspiration from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure

and figure out the mystery, you can go to trial. But in court, you still need evidence, even if the detective has worked it out, you still need evidence to get you the conviction. So that is where the thrust of our game is, in finding the evidence in order to prove it, rather than just getting through to the end.”

A GROWING CONSPIRACY

Still, setting a murder mystery in an open world isn’t without its risks. The pair acknowledge that it was a “fear and a challenge” that players could stumble upon a case-breaking clue right at the start of the game – though they acknowledge that it was ultimately a positive for the player experience, and it was something they just had to embrace.

A larger problem that plagued development was the ever-expanding scope of the game. Originally, Paradise Killer was intended as a walking simulator in the vein of The Chinese Room’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture – though they had prototyped plenty of other genres too. From a top down shooter to a Crazy Taxi homage.

“We tended to move quite quickly on stuff,” says Clarke Smith, “especially since we were using Unreal. It’s so easy to put stuff in, try it and abandon it or work it up. So we had a few ideas pretty quickly, and eventually settled on this one.”

This creative process of trying to define the kind of game they want to make may have been a useful one – but it added significant time to development.

“We originally set out to make this game in about 18 months,” says Clarke Smith, “and then it took about two and a half years. And thank you very much to our publisher [Fellow Traveller] for saving us on that!

“We set out to make something small, but when we started developing the concept, we didn’t arrive at the specifics of the concept early enough. If on day one of quitting our jobs and setting up home offices we’d said ‘we’re gonna make an open world murder mystery game, and you go to the trials at the end,’ we possibly could have shipped this thing in 18 months.

“We realised that the game needed to grow, to really realise its full potential and to become a game that would sell. We kind of hit on the concept late, and I think that that could have sunk it. Because if we shipped it on time when we originally planned to, it would be a shadow of what it is now and we would be applying for jobs.”

“It’s also exciting,” adds Crabtree, “because it’s our first game, we tried everything we thought might be cool. We didn’t always talk about it in advance, we’d just put it in and see what worked and what didn’t. So there’s probably quite a lot of – not necessarily wasted time, but we could have planned it a bit better had we thought more about it.”

ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE

The murder isn’t the only thing player has to investigate. The game starts in the middle of things, with Lady Love

Dies returning to Paradise Island. While she’s been in exile for a while and needs to be caught up on a few things, she’s not exactly a fish out of water either.

Unlike the player, Lady Love Dies already knows the fundamentals of this world. She knows its characters, she knows about the human sacrifices and the ominous goat god. The player meanwhile is thrown into the deep end, and has to learn to swim in this new world – with nothing but their AI companion Starlight (think a talking Wikipedia that solves crimes) to help them.

It’s a lot of information to take in at first, but the game does an exceptional job of laying out its world for the player to discover. But it’s hard not to wonder if it was a nightmare to make sure players weren’t overwhelmed.

“We rewrote the intro to the game so many different times, because we were very concerned about that,” notes Clarke Smith. “It’s easier to do a stranger in a strange land style story, because you can have a navigation assistant, like Navi in Zelda, to explain stuff.

“But the way we wrote the story we really didn’t think about that, we just kind of wrote it. So then once we were in it, we were like, ‘well, this is difficult!’ So that’s why there’s so many lore collectibles to find, so that if you are feeling overwhelmed you can pick them up at your own pace and learn things on your own terms.

“Originally at the beginning of the game, we forced you into Starlight to read all the biographies for all the characters. And only once you read them all were you allowed out into the world. And it was a really, really bad experience.

“So pretty late on we removed that, because it was bad. But we didn’t have another solution. And then pretty late on, I just copied and pasted all of the bio text into Starlight’s dialogue files, so that whenever you meet a character for the first time, Starlight will tell you a bit about them. But then we framed it as like, Starlight knows you haven’t done an investigation for three million days. So they’re reminding you, but every character comments on it. It’s a way of giving some up-front information, but then the characters can have a little bit of banter about it and kind of ease you in like that.”

GETTING TO KNOW YOU...

Outside of the investigation, perhaps the game’s biggest strength is in its characters. From the incredible high fashion of some of their designs, to their outlandish and distinct personalities, the game’s central cast will stick in player’s minds long after they’ve solved the case – as evidenced by the fan art the game has inspired.

“I’m glad people like the characters,” notes Crabtree. “When Oli was first pitching the game to me, it was very much about the characters. ‘It’s got to have these 80’s vogue-style poses and over the top characters,’ and I had some questions about if we should make them a bit more a bit more human and realistic, but the answer was ‘no, they need to be big, bright, bold characters to serve the game.’”

“Yeah, over the last two years, I’ve gotten really heavily into [the anime] JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure,” adds Clarke Smith. “It has these big, strange characters, they use a lot of high fashion and every one of them makes a big impression. It’s the same with Danganronpa. All of those characters are very much larger than life and make a big impression.

“I think you need that when you are thrust into this world, where you’re being asked to investigate a murder mystery and you need to remember who all the key players are. I wanted to do it for artistic reasons, because I didn’t want us to make a realistic game and I like big, weird characters. But also it’s very helpful for the player to have these strange names that they can latch on to and remember. As well as have very visually distinct characters that communicate something about the world, their personality and their motives, all with just a glance.”

It’s in no small part due to these characters – and the game’s incredible soundtrack – that Paradise Killer has been received as well as it has. The game has multiple Golden Joysticks nominations, including PC Game of the year. It’s a strong performance for a game that is, on paper at least, remarkably niche.

“We were, at least I was, incredibly nervous right before the release date,” says Crabtree. “I was scared about it getting panned, because it is divisive. We always knew you’d love it or hate it. So the first review dropped, and it was 9 out of 10... Yeah, I almost fell off my chair.”

“We always assumed this was going to be a one shot,” adds Clarke Smith. “We’d do this and then on the day of release we’d send out CVs and go back to the real world of game development in a studio. It has completely blown away all expectations.

“No one’s buying yachts off the back of this, but nor are we going back to working in a normal studio, so it is a big win for us.”