Video games also have experienced us infiltrating Nazi foundations for decades but Paradise Lost requires a more tempered way than the all-guns blazing activity of Wolfenstein or even Sniper Elite. Its underground eponymous setting is practically completely desolate from the outset of the narrative, therefore the closest you'll ever come to having a rifle is when you are having a rifle through filing cabinets for hints to ascertain precisely what fate befell its inhabitants. Yet while I explored the often troubling depths of Paradise Lost's Swastika-adorned subterranea using a continual sense of morbid fascination, its sparse way of storytelling meant that my emotional investment in the situation of its figures stayed permanently stranded on the surface.
In Paradise Lost's alternative history setting, World War II lasted to 1960, allowing sufficient time for the Nazis to develop strong atomic weapons in underground bunker facilities. Eventually, under pressure by the usa and Soviets, the Nazis unleashed a nuclear holocaust and hauled underground, decreasing the whole European continent to a uninhabitable wasteland. Paradise Lost's narrative picks up twenty years after, when a 12-year-old Polish survivor called Szymon enters one of these bunkers in search of a mysterious guy who knew his late mother, and I sensed a direct pull to discover exactly what or who was lurking under.
The eerie descent into Paradise Lost's cavernous expanse initially gives the impression that you are in for a certain kind of bunker-bound BioShock, and this feeling is strengthened when Szymon soon strikes up a yearlong radio connection with Ewa, that plays with an Atlas-style function in helping Szymon navigate throughout each area while retaining her true motives shy. But there are not any Splicers or Big Daddies to battle because you pick through the remains of Paradise Lost's abandoned dystopia, and for the most part your actions are quite basic and restricted to studying letters, listening to music logs, also pulling levers to power up some dormant mechanics that impede your path forward.
Outside of your interactions together with Ewa, that can be pretty engaging but generally limited to this intercom microphones you come upon every once in a while, you are effectively left alone to try and piece together the story by scouring each hall and office for as much information as possible. Undoubtedly the most exciting approach to consume a bit of the bunker's backstory is the number of occasions you have access to a archaic E-V-E computer terminal, which provides you with shadowy box-style recordings of the very last moments of activity in any particular area. E-V-E is the AI that controls both the bunker's security and agricultural methods, among other items, and it is strangely fascinating to see a crucial moment in this place's history unfold onto the terminal screen in a flurry of human-tracking warmth maps and crisis management likelihood calculations.
Curiously, these memory strings are more interactive, giving you control where troops have been deployed over the course of a battle between the Nazis and members of the Poland Underground State, for instance. These choices helped to keep me engaged in the E-V-E interactions and they do have minor consequences for Szymon's narrative, but that I could never really understand precisely how I was able to control events which had taken place.

Actually I sought outside and pored over every bit of information that I could see in Paradise Lost, and I still don't feel as though I ever knew enough about the people on either side of its central conflict to actually care about its outcome. At one stage Ewa insists that Szymon investigates the cells where Polish women were held for heinous experiments in eugenics, so as to pay respect to their own unique stories. But there's just so much you are able to find out when the only interactive object in one cell is a consumed punch card and yet another has nothing but a half-finished crossword mystery, leaving it difficult to contact their battle.
Paradise Lost fails to take full advantage of its gripping premise along with the haunting atmosphere of its surroundings, falling short of the standard set by other first-person storyline experiences introduced in the past few decades. It's not as detail-rich as Gone Home, the radio-based relationship between its two prospects never reaches the same degree of intimacy as Firewatch, and its own storytelling is not quite as inventive or interactive as of What Remains of Edith Finch. I respect the imagination that's gone into realising the design of its underground facility, but I only wish the scarcity of narrative detail and personality advancement within it hadn't left me feeling warmer than the concrete corridor. the impossible quiz online