Paratopic: An Exploration of Sensory Horror

A nightmare straight out of 1998

Paratopic is a pressure in the back of my skull.

We often describe aspects of horror by the auteurs who have gifted us the variations of the genre. Lovecraftian. Lynchian. Cronenbergian. While Paratopic certainly pulls from different aspects of the genre across its short run time, the major influence of the surreal horror game seems to be of sensory exploration: disgust, unease, anxiety, stress, pain.

While Paratopic released a few years ago, it has received a second life through sales on the Nintendo Switch and a re-examination of what exactly makes this small game so endearing and different. It doesn’t seem like much at first — the game itself costs only a few dollars and looks like a Nintendo 64 game. There’s little in the way of control, giving it the “walking simulator” feel of games such as Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Paratopic seems uninterested in how it is viewed in terms of being a video game, and is instead a short, arresting experience that requires multiple plays to fully grasp, and even then only the edges of its shape might be understood to the player.

Everything in Paratopic feels wrong, from its rust-and-vomit color scheme to the garbled English spoken by its few characters. The music and sound effects…