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Paradise Killer devs on the benefits of being really, really weirdJust go hog wild
Just go hog wild
When I sat down to talk to both Clarke Smith and technical director Phil Crabtree about Paradise Killer’s new update, it turns out that niche has already become quite large. Even Crabtree’s dad has played Paradise Killer, though Crabtree isn’t sure he really understood it. Crabtree also tells us he sometimes get messages from friends saying someone they know just played Paradise Killer and was talking about it. “It just seems so weird that that there is this audience there that we never expected, and it doesn’t seem that far away,” he says. “Like, it’s not this mystery group of people, there always seems to be some connection that’s quite close to you.”
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Crabtree and Clarke Smith arehigh on their own productin quite a refreshing way. “Phil and I have both worked in places where people would stop us from doing cool stuff, because the games were supposed to be more mainstream,” explains Clarke Smith, whose previous credits includeUntil DawnandThe Dark Pictures Anthology: Man Of Medan. “But when we expected [Paradise Killer] to sell five copies, and for us to set fire to all our savings and then go back to work having made something cool but that isn’t commercially viable, it’s like, well, we just don’t care. Let’s just go for it.”
“There’s a lot of trust there,” says Crabtree. “Like just okay, this seems cool to us. Let’s just keep kind of going with it. In terms of the world and the weirdness, if it felt right it kind of just went in - and I think perhaps we both lost track of the weirdness of it towards the end. Like, well, to us this seems pretty normal now.”
He admits, though, that for newcomers to Paradise Killer, it’s “quite an assault of weirdness at the start”, and he’s right. Coming back to it now, it’s really hard to overstate how completely alien Paradise Killer feels within an understandable framework. But he’s also right when he says that’s what the game needed. “We’ve not really tried to compromise on that too much,” he adds.
Not that they didn’t go through some iterations. Clarke Smith had never done game art before, and so in the first version of Paradise Killer’s world, the saturation levels on the post process was “dialed all the way up,” he tells us. “The sky was like, aggressively neon, and it was just way too much.
“Then Rachel [Noy, art director] took some time to play with the lighting and play with the post process,” he explains. “And like, the shadows became softer, the light became brighter and hazier and softer. And that creates the otherworldly feel rather than just, ‘Well, what happens if I put this slider all the way to the end?'”
There was also a placeholder UI that Crabtree says was “a lot more greys and browns” until Clarke Smith came up with the idea of leaning into the influence of Japanese city pop - bright blues, pinks and yellows. They broke down city pop album covers into shapes and styles, and then matched each screen of the UI to one of them.
Some of the characters, who appear as 2D beauties in a 3D world not too dissimilar from Spike Chunsoft’sDanganronpaseries, were transplanted from older ideas, like the armoured super-nark Grand Marshal Akiko 14, or doomed lovers Sam and Lydia Daybreak (a red skeleton who refused to die and a cool taxi driver, respectively). A lot of it, though, was a process of evolution: we’ve got this cool idea, let’s put it in. Shinji, a bright blue demon with a foxy face and a cuboid head who is constantly giving the double middle finger to the world (see below), evolved from the idea of having a mascot. “So we made one that no digital storefront will allow us to put pictures of,” says Clarke Smith. A significant influence was JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, where characters “are acting like everyone looks like them… and they’re all freaks.”
“When you make a video game you can do anything,” he says. “And, like, just have some fun, and just stop making boring normie characters that you want, that you would go to the cinema to see, like, do something weirder.” This makes me laugh, because I have never heard anyone use the term “normie” in an interview, and have now heard it twice. I point this out and they both laugh as well. “I’ll just rein myself in before I say something I’ll regret,” says Clarke Smith. “But I think, like, there’s no reason for so many games to be so pedestrian in their character design. More and more people will accept more and more different styles and characters and… just go wild. Just go absolutely hog wild on it, who cares?” Though he does laugh again and acknowledge someone spending $100 million on a game would probably say let’snotgo hog wild.
In some ways, it feels odd to see a game like Paradise Killer getting new stuff. This updated version does have some technical improvements - Crabtree says one of his favourite additions is the way the haptic feedback on the PS5 controller feels, an answer at which I, your dedicated PC-only correspondent, protest. “How do you like the sound ofDLSS?” says Clarke Smith, jumping in to add that the PC version does have some extra tech improvements, what with PCs being able to support things consoles don’t. “So there are some exclusive things. Which Phillip can talk about because they’re a lot of acronyms.”
And Crabtree is, indeed, able to elaborate: “We’ve now got your DirectX 12 ray tracing mode and we integrated DLSS for extra performance. And there’s just lots of little tweaks that have gone in around that, and lots of little performance tweaks and optimisations that we didn’t quite have time to get done.”
But in terms of the actual content of the game, the business of solving a mass-murder on a preternaturally strange island, Paradise Killer just feels very complete. A finished thing that you can’t easily crack open and add to, like a satellite in orbit, or a lasagne.
Image credit:Fellow Traveller/Leoful
One of the largest new additions is a whole album of B-sides from composer Barry “Epoch” Topping, of whom Clarke Smith says simply that “he gets it.” Theoriginal soundtrack, capturing what Clarke Smith calls a “luxurious island vibe”, is the essential weft to Paradise Killer’s warp, and has absolutley no business going as hard as it does.
“In the past we’d talked about how it would be cool to put out a B-sides album, but it was very much before Paradise Killer came out,” says Crabtree. “I’m a sucker for vocal tracks, I love vocal tracks, so I really wanted to see more of them in there.” The plan, then, was initally for some remixes of existing tracks, but then they realised adding new content could come with new songs - so we get three new tracks. And these are acquired in the game in a different way, via three new side characters.
Kaizen are currently working on their new game, the Cliff Notes for which are “bigger, and different, and not the same genreat all”. They’re trying to establish a Kaizen Game Works house style, though, so you’re “kind of vibing with the way we like to do stuff”, says Clarke Smith, even though the art style for this second game is, he says, wildly different.
