![]() ![]() Paradise Lost is like a bag of Doritos, it looks dense from the outside but once you actually open it up and reach around inside, it’s surprising just how much of the space is unused. Although the environments are extremely well crafted, from artificial beachsides beneath looming rock ceilings to the dishevelled dwellings of the living quarters, it’s mostly all look but don’t touch with very little available for up-close examination. Such stingy storytelling is sadly consistent throughout Paradise Lost. But there’s only so much you can learn when the sole interactive object in one cell is a used up punch card and another has nothing but a half-finished crossword puzzle, leaving it hard to connect with their struggle. At one point Ewa insists that Szymon explores the cells where Polish women were held for heinous experiments in eugenics, in order to pay respect to their individual stories. In fact I sought out and pored over every scrap of information I could find in Paradise Lost, and yet I still don’t feel like I ever knew enough about the individuals on either side of its central conflict to really care about its outcome. I guess I must have missed that memo, and believe me when I say I read absolutely every memo I could get my hands on. ![]() ![]() These choices helped to keep me engaged in the E-V-E interactions and they do have slight implications for Szymon’s story, but I could never really understand exactly how I was able to manipulate events that had already taken place. E-V-E is the AI that controls the bunker’s security and agricultural systems, among other things, and it’s oddly fascinating to watch a critical moment in this place’s history unfold on the terminal screen in a flurry of human-tracking heat maps and crisis management probability calculations.Ĭuriously, these memory sequences are interactive, giving you control over where troops are deployed during a conflict between the Nazis and members of the Poland Underground State, for example. By far the most stimulating way to absorb a bit of the bunker’s backstory is the handful of times you get access to an archaic E-V-E computer terminal, which provides you with black box-style recordings of the last moments of activity in any given area. ![]() Outside of your interactions with Ewa, which are reasonably engaging but generally restricted to the intercom microphones you come upon every once in a while, you’re effectively left alone to try and piece together the narrative by scouring each office and hallway for as much information as you can. But there are no Splicers or Big Daddies to fight as you pick through the remains of Paradise Lost’s deserted dystopia, and for the most part your actions are fairly basic and limited to reading letters, listening to audio logs, and pulling levers to power up any dormant mechanisms that impede your path forward. The eerie descent into Paradise Lost’s cavernous expanse initially gives the impression that you’re in for some kind of bunker-bound BioShock, and this feeling is reinforced when Szymon soon strikes up a two-way radio relationship with Ewa, who plays an Atlas-style role in helping Szymon navigate through each area while keeping her true motivations unclear. Paradise Lost’s story picks up twenty years later, when a 12-year-old Polish survivor named Szymon enters one of these bunkers in search of a mysterious man who knew his late mother, and I felt an immediate pull to find out exactly who or what was lurking below. Eventually, under pressure from the US and Soviets, the Nazis unleashed a nuclear holocaust and retreated underground, reducing the entire European continent to an uninhabitable wasteland. In Paradise Lost’s alternate history setting, World War II continued through to 1960, allowing enough time for the Nazis to develop powerful atomic weapons in subterranean bunker facilities. ![]()
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