The Distorted Faces on Our Screens
Paratopic's low-poly horror mirrors a reality not unlike our present.
For better or worse, things have settled into a barely functioning facsimile of what life used to be before the pandemic. We make our coffee, start working, sneak in a bit of shopping, all while we converge on Twitter to rage and shitpost our demons away. No thanks to our government, our habits have found a way to recompose themselves, except they now bear wrinkles that remind us we’re in a permanently inverted world. Wrinkles in the shape of face masks. A greater sense of spatial awareness. Daily reports of fatalities and infections. A steady drip of exhaustion, anger, and fear.
Even our attempts at maintaining our relationships in a socially distanced manner—the Zoom calls, the Google Meets, the FaceTimes—often feel like bleak replacements of the real thing. It’s a looking-glass version of the world we took for granted when things were normal, which honestly does the job well enough, except when it doesn’t. Talking to my friends, their faces so often prone to the distortions and static of a bad internet connection, feels mirrored by the strange faces that stare me back in Paratopic, an art house game by ArbitraryMetric. Its intentional use of a bygone graphical style presents a disturbing world inhabited by ordinary people…right until you see their faces up close and you question the reality that you’re trapped in.
Despite its brevity, Paratopic’s intentions are difficult to parse. This experimental game puts you in the shoes of a smuggler, a hired gun, and a girl on a hike, whose individual vignettes are linked together by a stash of VHS tapes being transported across the border. There is something unspoken about these tapes, a terrible secret that compels people to slip them into the player and watch.
The game’s approximation of people and places are hewn from the low-poly 3D graphics of games from the late 90’s, which was more of a technological limitation than an artistic choice at the time. This blocky, flat-featured look dominated the decade’s most popular games such as the original Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. To see the admittedly dated visuals of these games in 2020 can feel like waking up from that cruel trick nostalgia likes to play on our minds.
The resulting atmosphere in Paratopic is an eerie version of reality where things pass well enough to be recognized for what they are—a diner, a vending machine, a man behind the counter of a gas pump—except everything looks like a flat and unsettling mockery of the things they’re supposed to represent. In this world, people talk, cars run, and birds fly. Just not in a way you ever get used to.
There is meaning to be gleaned in the game’s atmosphere, its chronologically warped storytelling, and the suggestion of something eldritch hidden in the tapes, but the characters’ faces in Paratopic refuse to make me think of anything else. These are not the faces we’re used to, whether in video games or in real life. Each of the handful of characters you encounter in the game bear the same distorted and unnatural expressions—almost as if they’re hiding behind badly carved masks of their own faces. They speak to you in a garbled tongue, something akin to English but bereft of the patterns that distinguish human language from the noises that animals make.
Every time I come off a video call with my friends or co-workers, the app asks me to rate my experience. I give the video quality a middling score each time. There’s always one or two faces rendered inscrutable or frozen in a grotesque expression because of a bad internet connection. Because of this, the flow of conversation stalls, a participant gets booted off the room, or worse, the pixelated remains of their face never resolve themselves until the call ends. We’ve made adjustments to these inconveniences over time, but these virtual hiccups feel like grim reminders that we’re living in a broken reality, much like the abnormal faces of Paratopic seem designed to break you out of the immersion.
Even the game’s disjointed narrative feels like a reflection of the video conferencing nightmare we’re all stuck in. Paratopic drops you in and out of scenes that begin and end abruptly: you begin in a hallway confrontation with a power-tripping security officer. The scene changes and you’re in a diner, a pistol and six bullets on your table. It cuts to you in your apartment, and then to you driving. Sometimes, there’s a suitcase sitting in the passenger seat. Sometimes, a gun. Sometimes, nothing.
These fragmented vignettes come so close to the way I’ve been catching up with my friends these days. Our first video call since the lockdown was a mix of novelty and amusement, but the mood of these interactions has since fluctuated as the months wore on. Sometimes, we’re happy. Sometimes, we’re a demoralized mess. Sometimes we’re chatty, but most times we’re just tired. We needed no context or explanation for these crazy emotional shifts; we’re all going through the same unfathomable thing.
Paratopic never reveals what people see in those tapes. The only thing we know is that something breaks inside them as they watch. Are they perhaps recordings of some twisted truth that drives them mad? Do they see themselves on the television screen, like a fuzzy mirror that reflects their own unreal faces back at them? Could it be a metacommentary of the games of our childhood, the film of nostalgia peeled back and exposing us to the ugly and dysmorphic shapes that we once beheld with awe?
The unshakeable horror of Paratopic hits so close to our present reality in the way it uses a crude and outdated visual style as an intimation of the upside-down world that it creates for the player. Its inhabitants are oblivious of the things amiss in their reality—the weird faces, the jagged polygons of everyday objects—until the tapes are played back to show them just how gruesome and artificial it all is.
My encounters with these characters scare me. Not because of the unsettling, non-human faces I’m forced to confront, but because these are the same faces I look at when I’m trying to have a good time with my friends in front of a camera. They’re distorted, distant, and unreal. Even as I enjoy pockets of solace by talking to people on my computer, their occasionally warping faces, pixelated smiles, and garbled voices keep reminding me that we’re still waist-deep in a nightmare that seems impossible to wake up from.