August has been a hell of month for me. Between personal issues, vet appointments for my cat, and the power adapter of my Xbox 360 getting fried, I didn’t have time to complete the game I had intended to review for Critical Miss this month. But I wanted to get a short post up anyway, so I decided to review a short game I recently experienced.

Paratopic is a first-person horror experience. I remember hearing about the game when it came out, but I didn’t know much about it besides it was short and the graphics were apparently creepy. This won’t be an in depth review due to the short length of the game and lack of hard mechanics in general, but I want to discuss some things that really got to me.

You play as three characters in Paratopic: a hiker trying to catch a photo of a rare bird, a smuggler transporting illegal VHS tapes across the border, and an assassin as they perform a hired hit. A lot of the fun in the game comes from trying to unravel each character’s storyline. Since there are no character features on display and the story jumps from moment to moment, it’s up to the player to pick apart the plot. This goes a long way to immerse the player. Since the game lacks a lot of moment-to-moment gameplay, the best way to engage the player is to give them something to think about as they play. The mystery of the plot and who you are playing as is a constant in the back of your head while playing through the game. As you are forced to search around for context clues, you have to study the world. You get so drawn in that you even start to notice when things are slightly off.

The visuals do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the horror, but there are hardly any overtly scary moments in the game. Paratopic excels at getting under your skin and unsettling the player. The game is bathed in the dying light of a perpetual sunset and the art style is reminiscent of early 3D games from the PS1 or Quake era. Everything is orange or brown or deep black darkness. But it’s the subtleties that shine through in the visuals. Characters’ faces will slide around the model of their heads, landscapes are jagged and harsh, and the textures constantly change on the trees as you walk through them, making them seem to pulsate and bubble like one of Lovecraft’s soggoths.

I think my favorite way the game unnerves the player is with the scene cuts. Each time the game moves to the next character or next part of the sorry, there is not a smooth transition or expected jump during a usual story beat. It just cuts in the middle of an action and you are in a new location. You might be walking along a cliff, watching it twist out in front of you, and think you have a long way to walk, but no—cut and you are driving in a car. The transitions are never expected and extremely jarring. They just make you feel uncomfortable through the entire playthrough because you never know when the next cut is coming up. They almost act as jump scares without actually resorting to jump scares in the game and it’s extremely clever.

I’m not going to spoil any of the story or any of the surprises or scares here. Paratopic is so short, about an hour long max, so just play through it if you are interested. The game is an incredibly effective horror experience by how it works to unnerve the player. I don’t get actually scared from a lot of media anymore, but Paratopic did manage to get under my skin a bit. I would compare it to an Ari Aster film like Hereditary. The unrelenting tension and atmosphere has you on edge even while nothing horrifying is happening directly on screen.