Paradise Lost

This game is a story-driven, 1st person walk-sim, no denial of that, and I happen to be happy it is, because it's a genre that I love. Actually, there is probably a tiny bit more interaction in this one than in most. The story is okay, especially the overall uchrony setting, that is unfortunately not used to its full potential, imho. Nothing breathtaking either, and, as others pointed out, pretty foreseeable. I'm a bit frustrated that some part of the story is left in the dark, though (or maybe a missed part of the story, but I doubt it), and the whole timeline is confusing. There are "multiple endings", but they are all the same in actuality, and none has any kind of developed epilogue (there wasn't a prologue, either, and the actual motivations of the protagonist to enter the bunker are pretty vague). Technically, the game is beautiful but vastly under-optimized at the time of this writing. I had a decent 35-45-ish fps on my gtx960 for most of the game, but the last part (from the cemetery) dropped to 10-20-ish for unknown reasons. I also experienced missing props in the house, and missing book, and I'm not alone. The game actually plainly crashed at the very end, in the last cut-scene. Luckily, the game auto-save often, but there is no way to restart anywhere else than at the last checkpoint, or restart the full chapter. I actually had to restart the full "Depression" chapter because of a door that wouldn't open at the very end of the chapter. So, I'd recommend the game at this price point, IF there is a patch or two coming that would alleviate the technical frustration.

I really wanted to give this the chance and actually complete it, even though I knew it was going to be a slog after the first chapter... However, I ran into a bug somewhere near the end (I guess) of chapter 4, which made it impossible to progress and when I restarted the game, it didn't restart and the checkpoint but at the beginning of the chapter - this was the breaking point for me, as I wasn't in the mood to go through the snail-paced experience again. Other than the above, to give a general overview of the game - the atmosphere and the graphics are nice, but that's pretty much it. Usually, these short and simple story-driven games at least make up for everything else with their interesting story and writing, but this game doesn't have that. I haven't finished the game, but I'm pretty sure I know what the big reveal was going to be anyway, because it seems pretty obvious from very early in the game. The writing is also very stiff and simple and voice acting is really bad - they should have just let them speak Polish and have subtitles on at all times... The controls are atrocious, the character is moving at an incredibly slow speed and using shift won't make you run but instead just walk slightly faster. The way you interact with objects is made unnecessarily complicated. In general, it feels like the controls have been made so bad just to increase the length of the game. Sadly, I can't recommend this one at all :(

A short but interesting novel like game. Gameplay is very simple, and very easy, so only three stars. Though I'm not sure what could've improved the gameplay without breaking the story. Encountered one bug casuing the character to get stuck when loading a save (turn off head bob to fix it). But other than that, it was a nice and smooth ride.

The game has an interesting plot taking place in alternative history, where ww2 ended differently. Unfortunately Paradise Lost is just a boring walking simulator with some bugs developers couldn't be bothered to patch up. If you have Head Bob setting enabled, you won't be able to walk at all after you load saved game. Walking sim witch broken walking? Really? This isn't something difficult to diagnose and fix but no, nobody had time or will to do it. What's worse, I sometimes encountered a bug during interactions causing playable character blocking itself, which required loading last checkpoint to fix. And even when everything's working well, the hero is moving very slow. The game is also very short and initially interesting story quite quickly turns bland. On the plus side, there's really interesting dilemma with the final choice. Most of these cons I could really overlook, given that devs aren't some big company with thousands employees and loads of money, but I really can't say anything good about devs who don't patch bugs.

On sale this game might be worth it, but at its current listing it's about 3-4 hours of gameplay for 15$. Nearly every other game has a better price to playtime ratio. Paradise Lost also doesn't really feel like a game, you don't make any meaningful decisions, you are on rails the entire experience at a cripplingly slow pace, and the entire experience consists of you walking around dimly lit rooms and caves while you listen to a young girl's voice occasionally. It's another one of those walking simulators that have become so abundant in the gaming market in recent years. If you are into those, then by all means get the game, otherwise I'd wait until there's a sale and you have absolutely nothing better to do.