Urban Divinity: The Aesthetic Brilliance of Paradise Killer

I awake in a bright white room, emerging from my charmingly hideous leopard-print bedsheets and padding onto my cold marble floor, and walk over to examine the still pools and golden walkways of a courtyard, the home and prison of Lady Love Dies. I glance around the boudoir, take in the scenery, and attempt to head out… only to be greeted by a crouching blue monstrosity with two of its four arms extended in a middle-finger salute. The apparition introduces himself as Shin U’thk Jiggath, or Shinji for short.

Shinji’s design prepares you, in many ways, for the alien beauty of the world you are about to enter. He has a humanoid body, a deer’s snout, two tufts of fur that seem to suggest the idea of compound eyes, and a strange sharp-lined obelisk where a normal creature’s cranium might be. Shinji is a Goetic demon for a digital age, a walking Dadaist collage combining the organic and artificial. His strangeness immediately marks him as something from beyond the stars of this game’s world, yet his casual speech and easy vulgarity are shockingly ordinary. This, I believe, is the core of Paradise Killer’s aesthetic charm: the effortless mingling of the sublime and the mundane, the tacky with the truly elegant.

The island of Paradise itself is outrageous, a sprawling vaporwave cityscape that looks like Jean Giraud was asked to put his spin on Miami. It’s become a cliché to describe the visual language of a game as “cinematic”, and mercifully that’s not something I’m tempted to do here — no, if Paradise Killer must be described in the terms of another medium, it would be literature. The environment and character design have the kinds of creative flourishes that I’m used to only seeing in particularly strange urban fantasy, or maybe the occasional short-form experience on itch.io. The purple stone statues scattered throughout the city appear dull in sunlight, but glow from within in an array of beautiful colors when viewed in the dark. There’s a Japanese-style suburb lying peacefully in the shadow of a massive glowing pyramid. The “idol” of the city of Paradise is a gorgeous aeons-old woman with a goat’s head, and she’s used to advertise anything from food to factory jobs… when she’s not selling you secrets from her hideout in the sewers.

Paradise is, in short, an exercise in gorgeous, calculated excess. A “nearly perfect” island heaven where every creative choice is (intentionally) a bit too much — The graphic design of everything from the UI to the signs is overindulgent, a tropical web 2.0 nightmare. An excruciating amount of gold and white marble is employed in the architecture. The foliage looks like it was pulled out of the wet dreams of a woman retiring to Florida. The wrought-iron fences are painted in an eye-searing, gorgeous fuschia.

All of it is done with frankly astonishing attention to detail, and one gets the sense as a viewer that nothing in the game world was placed by accident. In the words of John Waters: “One must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste. To understand bad taste, one must have very good taste.” The aesthetic of Paradise Killer is in very bad taste indeed — and, like the island it takes place on, it’s nearly perfect.