Man, not to beat too often on the same drum here, but 2017 really was a trove of underappreciated delights. I obviously picked up on that message last year when I somehow completed forty-four games released in 2017 I'd never played before but that it still remains applicable months into 2022 just emphasizes it further. With the exception of a few minor technical bugs, I really enjoyed Paradigm: Australian scamp Jacob Janerka's loving ode to classic point-and-click adventures and one of the most consistently amusing games I've played since Jazzpunk.
Paradigm, a slovenly mutant living in a remote (and highly irradiated) region of eastern Europe, wants nothing more than to sit at his computer, compose repetitive electronic music, and compulsively eat bowls of cereal. A procession of unfortunate events forces him from his power plant home to chase down a BIOS disk to avert a nuclear catastrophe and then into the bowels of the corporate headquarters of the villainous DUPA Genetics, the CEO of which is planning to covert all the world's entertainment into only glam metal and professional wrestling. The story is, of course, deliberate nonsense meant to ferry you from one comedic situation to the next and the game's charm is in its many one-off environmental gags and some well-voiced dialogues with other bizarre mutant people with their own problems to deal with. A typical scenario might involve you being trapped in an office by a sapient water cooler who has gone mad after hearing too many poorly-retold jokes from television shows, or a mission to score some drugs by beating the local dealer at a video game about boosting the confidence of Final Fight-esque street thugs.
To say too much more about Paradigm in the micro would rob it of many of its standout moments, but in the macro it's still a perfectly satisfactory adventure game in that classic Sierra/LucasFilms inventory puzzle mold. You procure objects, figure out where to use them to resolve the current predicament, exhaust dialogue trees with NPCs for all relevant information, and eventually the game moves forward with new areas to explore and NPCs to talk to. The puzzle difficulty is extremely fair: while the game does have its own hint system (which also doubles as a hotspot highlighter, my favorite feature in any adventure game) there are often more subtle clues as to where to go and what to do next the moment you pick up a task, and the player always has a firm idea what objective Paradigm is ultimately working towards. This approach is effectively foolproof; a means to deliver its yuks without causing you to be lost for an hour unable to progress because of some obtuse puzzle solution. It's also a game that doesn't have too many moving parts - the maximum number of screens you can visit at any time is in the single-digits - and subsequently does its darnedest to not wear out its welcome by extending the story into infinity. That said, there's more than a few bonus features and asides the player can enjoy: a fast travel device found early on also includes some mini-games, like a post-apocalyptic dating simulator where you can date a duck-human (though sadly not Duckman, who I believe already had an adventure game of his own) and an "existential endless runner."
The presentation of Paradigm is also top-notch. The visuals are frequently surreal but very detailed especially in the dialogue scenes where you get close-ups of the character's faces, the eclectic soundtrack (by Wrench-se) creates the perfect '70s/'80s Tangerine Dream former-Soviet sci-fi atmosphere the aesthetic is going for and offers plenty more idiosyncrasy besides, and the jokes are of that scattershot approach where you might not laugh at a goof but could well be bowled over by the one that immediately follows. Unfortunately, the showy visuals - specifically the glitchy degauss effect whenever the player accesses their inventory - caused the game to constantly hitch up on me while playing. Probably a potato PC issue no-one with half-decent hardware needs to heed, but it's something that caused my playthrough to occasionally grind to a halt as the game took its sweet time to resume normal operations again.
On the whole, though, I was thoroughly impressed with almost every aspect of Paradigm despite a rough start. Any video game that can elicit a sensible chuckle - the cornerstone of Australian comedy as I understand it - has accomplished the nigh-impossible if past experiments combining games and humor are any indication, there's a significant element of imagination and ingenuity that went into Paradigm's many scenarios and puzzles while still keeping them relatively simple to solve and simple to understand, it's definitely one of the more intriguing aesthetics for a game I've seen and there's something about its peculiar ugliness contrasted with its sharp and clean backgrounds that reminded me a lot of the more experimental adventure games of the late '90s, like the unsettling edgelord antics of Harvester or the occasional rough chuckles of Toonstruck. (If you recall that Total Distortion game that GBEast were temporarily fascinated by, Paradigm frequently feels like it was cut from the same "MTV animators run amok" cloth.) Plus I love the many, many dumb little touches that are too numerous to name here, like how the "Pick Up" command would almost always invoke pick-up lines whenever Paradigm couldn't just pick the object up, or a five minute looping sound clip on the radio of SungWon Cho (uncredited, for some reason) talking about how his friend was turned into a car after being cursed by a Baba Yaga and was then tricked by said friend into giving his gear stick a handy. If you were a fan of Jazzpunk's smartly-absurd skits or the Ben and Dan irreverent parodies, I'd recommend giving this lumpy-headed layabout the time of day.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
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Post-Script: I took a bunch of screenshots of this one, so here's a few more absent any context:
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