Paratopic and No one lives under the lighthouse. Full horror in 60 minutes – review

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Video games often require a lot of effort and time to complete – especially AAA titles that can stretch for 30, 50, or even 100 hours. But sometimes you want to get a quality experience quickly and with minimal cost. In such cases, indie projects with compact but impressive stories help me out. And they need nothing at all time – as for an evening movie viewing.

Lynch, Cronenberg and Violence

Paratopic starts off in the quarry: you are standing in a dark corridor, a gloomy man with a tie and universal anguish in his eyes declares: “You have an enemy, buddy”. After a couple of minutes, the raven sitting on the background of the captions, slowly pecks the bloodied corpse. You turn your head and find yourself in a cafe. The man at the opposite table urges you to be a professional. What is going on? With a gun ready, you open the door, you see a frightened person behind it, another second … And you are alone in the quiet poisonous green foyer, waiting for the elevator. The eateries and the trail are cold.

The boss’s face is excessively pixelated, but, oddly enough, there is a plot explanation

There is no single plot in Paratopic. The whole game is a collection of stories that seem unrelated to each other. One reveals the very robbery of a cafe; in the other, you walk meditatively through the forest and take pictures of birds until something bad happens. In the third – you are conducting discussions about milk with a suspicious seller in a night supermarket. But it quickly becomes clear that mystery cassettes are at the center of the plot. For 40-50 minutes you will see a lot of films, bloodied pieces of flesh, alcoholics, parasites, bullies and a cute bunker.

With a suspicious seller, you can talk about more subtle matters.

The game does not explain the rules of this kaleidoscope. It is futile to try to determine which of the characters you are here and now: the boundaries between their stories are too unstable. But thanks to the fact that the writers refuse to explain, you have a chance to turn away from the story and pay attention to other details. For example, how the distorted speech of all the characters sounds: as if it was recorded on an old cassette and played backwards, in the style of a black wigwam from Twin Peaks. Or how Paratopic deliberately sets a broken, arrhythmic pace of passage. Some scenes are so dynamic that the transitions resemble a torn movie editing, while in others you have to get stuck: either you wait unbearably long when the elevator reaches the desired floor, then you go at night on an endless highway. It turns out convincing enough to cause the player paranoia. After all, you never know at what point the dynamics will again change unpredictably.

Paratopic seems chaotic, but all of its fragmented fragments add up to the whole picture. At least at the idea level: dangerous cassettes not only appear in the plot, but also mount the reality of the game world. The whole game and the transitions in it – and there are several films glued together for someone’s evil whim. Fans of the project unanimously recognized “Videodrome” Kronenberg is the ideological inspirer of this idea. Yes, and David Lynch is present here on an ongoing basis: in addition to the manner of speech, an endless night highway also sends him. Paratopic successfully uses the achievements of eminent directors, but is not fond of homages – and therefore does not seem to be just a copy. Such a balance provides the game with conceptual harmony, despite formal chaos.

Sisyphus and the lighthouse

No one lives under the lighthouse also begins not quite obvious. You find yourself locked inside a lighthouse – a dark and tall brick building. On the left – the door to the pantry and the basement, directly – the stairs up. What do we have to do? On the upper platform, we notice that the lighthouse lamp is off. So, you need to light it: it seems that there were barrels of oil at the bottom. And why is this winch? Yeah, apparently, you need to twist it in order to set the lantern in motion, up again. But where are the terrible knocks on the whole structure and ominous shadows? Why is it impossible to leave the building? For now, you have to postpone these issues and just try to get the lighthouse working.

When you finally cope with this, the camera moves away, you see a lit lamp – and then it suddenly goes out, and the prologue ends.

The first day of the game comes: after the mysterious disappearance of the previous caretaker, the main character arrives at the lighthouse – a newcomer to the replacement. Setting inevitably arouses association with recent The lighthouse Robert Eggers; there is also a small rocky island with disgusting weather and a minimum of buildings. The story unfolds linearly – the player just needs to look after the lighthouse, the caretaker’s house and the nearby barn. And the caretaker profession is not very diverse, so you have to do the same thing: light the lamp, turn the winch, wipe the glass and mop the floors. But every day it becomes more and more difficult to maintain order. It seems that nature itself is rebelling against the human attempt to impose its own order. Either the lighthouse goes out, or the cables break, and strange dark spots appear on the floor in the morning.

Most of the time spent in No one lives under the lighthouse, you feel like Sisyphus: for the lighthouse to work stably, you have to do the same job every day. And even the appearance of a very specific physical threat does not fundamentally change anything. Managed to escape from an incomprehensible creature and close in the barn? Well, the lighthouse itself will not light up. He sat and go on to work further.

On the other hand, the appearance of a monster changes the very mood of the game – but, alas, not for the better. While you are working alone, it is really creepy on an empty rainy island: not to understand who or what interferes with the work of the lighthouse, makes noise in the tower, leaves spots on the floor. Paranoia gives the most pessimistic guesses, imagination depicts horrors worthy of Lovecraft. And then a giant crab suddenly starts chasing after you – just running away from it is no more difficult than scrubbing the floors. Each time, the monster only remains that it is upset to wave its claws and crawl away.

This part of the game is perplexing: should I be scared or laugh? Was the monster made so strange to confuse me, or did the developers just not have enough resources for more? The ending of the game could probably help with the answer, but it offers even more routine with less content. It’s one thing to regularly clean the lighthouse, alternating at least some kind of procedure. And the other is to loop around the mazes for a very long time, and then row in the boat, monotonously pressing E. for five minutes in a row.

In the eyes of sinister seafood, you look very small and defenseless, but actually running away from the monster is not so difficult

Between expectations from the first minutes and the reality of the second half of the game there is a noticeable gap. No one lives under the lighthouse borrows directly and indirectly from film and literature, especially inspired by the already mentioned Lovecraft. But, despite an interesting idea, the game is falling apart as an integral statement.

Minimalism and harmony

Paratopic and No one lives under the lighthouse are similar: cinematic allusions, graphics in the spirit of the first PlayStation, a minimum of resources. Both games use the same tools, but the final result is different.

Take at least the location design. Both development teams have managed to create landscapes that have long crashed into memory, despite the low resolution. It does not matter that Paratopic manages to show a whole gallery of different places, and the hero No one lives under the lighthouse does not leave the same island. A tower at the edge of the forest, a lonely night city, an observation deck overlooking the endless sea, an inexorable wall of rain or a foggy haze – you can put everything off for a short while and enjoy the views, there is nowhere to hurry.

Moreover, admiring the landscapes always takes place alone. At Paratopic, almost all human communication is slurred muttering. In addition, the interlocutors are so strange that you can figure it out: these are real people or just projections of the film. And No one lives under the lighthouse from the very beginning leaves the caretaker face to face with horror: even if some creature has just attacked you, it will not work to tell someone. You just have to live on.

One of the few ways to smooth this endless loneliness is music. Paratopic often sets it as a backdrop: depending on the situation, the ambient can be harsh, emphasizing scenes of violence, or retro-nostalgic, adding color to a black night. And the fragmented, steep music of The Lighthouse, ironically, resembles the Paratopic narrative. At the right moments, she enhances the eerie mood of the scene, but delicately, without excesses. The radio tape recorder in the first game and the gramophone in the second dilute the surrounding unkind silence and distract from bad thoughts. Characteristically, in both cases, the developers turn to the musical motives of the past: as if the memories of the past help the heroes if not to defeat the evil, then at least it is easier to survive.

Music helps you to inspire and gather strength, but the monster is taken by surprise

But, despite the bewitching views and music, both games do not give up the feeling of routine. On the one hand, it seems that monotonous actions and long pauses are a good idea. They allow you to take a break, pay attention to the contrast between the ordinary and the terrible, draw a conditional boundary of reality, on which the characters are delicately balanced.

On the other hand, all these searches of deep meaning can turn out to be an air castle. What if it’s not a concept, but a banal lack of budget and development skills? Hence the long scenes with pauses, and the inevitable sagging at a pace. It is difficult to say for sure, but for some reason it seems that Paratopic is nevertheless closer to the first option, and No one lives under the lighthouse – to the second. By the standards of game design, a five-minute ride on the night highway is an eternity. It is so long that you can go through all the stages of adoption along the way, but at the same time, this boredom feels right. But in No one lives under the house, when after dull wanderings in the maze, you endlessly press the same key to row … It seems like it’s just boring.

However, the main point in which the two projects diverged is the horror strategy. Paratopic goes the classical way: adheres to understatement, pumps suspense. Despite the killings and dismemberment, the game does not explain what really happened. You don’t understand anything at the beginning of the walkthrough – and likewise you don’t understand anything at the end. In a small budget, this option seems ideal. If you do not show the “main” horror, then you can, firstly, save money, and secondly – to maintain the intrigue.

No one lives under the lighthouse, by contrast, puts all the cards on the table. The game shows the monster and then tells its story. He even explains the riddle of dark spots – but why? Pixel graphics work the project hand in hand until the player until the end understands what exactly he sees in front of him; this is really scary. But as soon as everything secret becomes apparent, there is no suspense left, and from the sight of the monster it is more likely to laugh.

However, horror and humor often go hand in hand: Rob Zombie films and other similar creations are an example of this. But here the issue of balance is important. Paratopic makes an unambiguous choice in favor of seriousness: yes, the game has a specific sense of humor at the level of dialogue and super-large, but low-poly plans. However, in relation to the main idea, he remains in the background – and rather complements it.

In the “Lighthouse” you have to choose. If you take the game seriously, then it scares ineptly. If with humor – then the joke is too long. But if you take everything together, you get a nice project with an interesting idea, torn apart by internal contradictions. Of course, you can try to give them as an advantage: they say, that’s how it was conceived. But, in the end, Paratopic clearly shows that the secret of success is in harmony. Then the budget is not very important.