PARANOIA

In Paranoia, the devilish Dr. Iblis has tasked you, the player, with exploring a series of copies of the same room. Your job is to determine whether each version is identical to the original room, or if an anomaly is present. If you do this successfully 13 times in a row, you reach the end of the game. If you make a mistake, the counter resets.

I ended up playing the game three times, making one mistake out of the 44 or so rooms that I encountered (the mistake was on my first playthrough, which I’m guessing was an absent object that I didn’t notice the omission of due to carelessness).

You might wonder, based on the premise, why I found the game interesting enough to play that much. The answer, really, is that it’s surprisingly addictive. In my first playthrough, I encountered a wacky meta room that was so compelling that it made me lean forward and get invested in just how weird the anomalies would get. That’s why I ended up playing the game multiple times—a craving for the potential for novel, odd experiences in this room. Unfortunately, that ended up being by far the weirdest version of the room that I encountered, but many of the anomalies were still fun to encounter.

The main reason I decided to write a review for this game is to discuss an aspect of the gameplay experience that I found interesting. The moment you notice any difference, there is no gameplay reason to continue exploring the room and you can proceed by pressing the green button. Many of these are instant solves based on an obvious difference in the room description, meaning that you might spend as little as 10 seconds in the anomaly rooms. Despite this, I did find myself lingering a bit to experience the weirdness. For instance, if you are greeted with an off smell, there is no strategic reason to trace its source, but I always did just for the novelty of the description. Overall, though, this game mechanic creates a significant disparity; the vast majority of time spent playing this game will be spent exploring the identical, uninteresting version of the room.

This has three specific effects that I want to discuss.

(1) Learning the room. Because so much time is spent in the original version of the room, this has the important function of reinforcing the player’s memory of the space. I read the same sentences so many times that the differences stood out instantly when they appeared. I think this is an important gameplay function, because if you (for instance) didn’t thoroughly inspect the first version of the room, you’d be at the mercy of the anomalies in the future if you didn’t have subsequent chances to learn what was in the normal version of the room.

(2) Generating the titular paranoia. Each time you are faced with a normal room, you approach a kind of emotional tipping point where you have to decide whether it is worth wasting more time looking at the normal version of the room, or commit to the idea that you are in a normal room and risk pressing the red button. At some point, the tipping point is reached, and you press it. But just prior to the tipping point, you are still feeling paranoid. Is there something I forgot to taste? Did I remember to check the panel buttons to see which one was on the left? And so forth. The paranoia grows more intense as the counter gets closer to 13, because failure means redoing what feels like a lot of progress. In that sense, this disparity in gameplay is essential to fostering the atmosphere the game evokes.

(3) Creating a sense of disappointment. The reason I was so addicted to replaying this game was because I wanted to see the bizarre ways in which the room might have changed. This means that, the longer spent in a normal version of the room, the more disappointed I started to feel. Essentially, “That’s too bad, I’m not going to get to see anything weird this time.” So in an interesting way, the structure of the game intensified a craving for novelty, and a concomitant sense of disappointment at the resigned realization that tasting the vase will not result in a deranged experience this time.

This all is thematically engaging to me. The game has understated sinister elements—the suspicious name “Iblis,” thirteen being the number of success, the strange experience of what happens when you press the button and the room resets, and the eerier or more disruptive anomalies—that make an outwardly normal room feel liminal and disconcerting. But the main thing that I think is important is how it is immersive into the role of a test subject. I learned to suppress the part of my brain that claims (incorrectly, apparently) that I don’t have any interest in tasting a painting, and it became a routine activity that I stopped questioning. I kept playing more than I was required to because the game runs on a variable-interval schedule where you could, at any time, receive the reward of something new and exciting. The game used cheap but powerful psychological tactics to train me to continue playing, and because of the lab-experiment theming, also made me first passively and then actively aware that I was succumbing to that temptation, which I think is fascinating.

I was torn between a 4- and 5-star rating for this game (it’s a true 4.5). As thought-provoking and addictive as it is, I decided on the lower side because the game most frequently simulates repetition and disappointment, so I’m finding it hard to weigh the fleeting moments of wonder and excitement at finding an anomaly as overwhelmingly favorable enough to offset that experience.

Ultimately, it’s very well crafted and the self-contained environment is just detailed enough to be interesting to explore without becoming overwhelming. As a result, I give this game a strong recommendation for anyone who thinks the premise sounds appealing at all.

One of the things that I really look forward to in ParserComp is seeing games that try to come up with different gameplay mechanics for the hoary old parser interface, because even almost 50 years on from Adventure, there’s still plenty of fertile ground to be plowed. PARANOIA’s twist is so clever yet so well-suited to its format that it feels like someone must have tried it before, but as far as I know this is a real innovation: taking the meticulous investigation of a fractally-detailed environment and making it into the core gameplay, rather than just a means to the end of solving medium-dry-good puzzles, by challenging the player to notice small (and not-so-small) discrepancies – it’s an interactive version of those puzzles where you’re supposed to find three differences in a pair of seemingly-identical images, livened up with impeccably-timed comedy bits. If there’s not much plot to speak of and the instructions could use some sharpening, those are minor blips indeed compared to what it gets right.

Might as well start with the plot, so we can get that out of the way: it’s your basic Portal setup, as you’re participating in an experimental scenario whose contours are at first unclear. After you’re given a chance to poke and prod at your sparse surroundings – a vase of flowers, some wall art, a couple pieces of simple furniture – you’re instructed to push a particular button, and then the fun begins. The lights go out, the scientist’s flunkies scatter around changing some key detail about the room – or perhaps they don’t. And you need to use your five senses and your memory (there’s no undo or transcript feature available, and the scrollback window clears for each round) to suss out what, if anything, is now different.

Sometimes it’s very easy, obvious just from seeing the updated room description print out, but sometimes it takes close, careful investigation to identify the change, and the game does a great job of milking the disjunction between those two modes for comedy: a couple of times, I got a couple of rounds in a row where nothing changed, which of course occasions the most thorough poking and prodding, and self-doubt before you hit the all-clear button, only to be greeted with a ridiculously over-the-top shift that had me burst out laughing. I won’t spoil any of them, but there are some great gags here that go beyond just changing the physical layout of the room and mess with the player’s expectations in really entertaining ways. Being funny is rewarding on its own, of course, but these eruptions of hilarity also help with the pacing, since they usually provide an easy win – you need to get 14 guesses in a row right to achieve victory – or at least switch up the steps required to solve the round, and help motivate the player to press on to see what might happen next.

My only real quibble here is that it took me a little while to get into a groove with the game, which I think could be streamlined. In particular, I found the opening instructions ambiguous about whether I was meant to be comparing each round with the original state of the room, or to how the room looked in the round that came before. It’s the former, which for good or ill keeps the madness from escalating too far, but I wasn’t sure at first, and combined with the counterintuitive way the buttons are labeled – the green button means there is a change and the red one means there isn’t, which makes sense from a yes/no perspective, but my brain interpreted green as “everything’s fine” and red as “watch out, something’s changed.” After a couple of restarts it all became second nature, but slightly clearer framing might have helped me get to the good stuff quicker. Oh, and the winning menu asks if you want to UNDO, like always, but of course UNDO is disabled. But those are my only bits of feedback – this is a unique, engaging piece of IF unlike anything you’ve played before, and well worth the fifteen minutes or half hour it takes to win. So long as ParserComp keeps turning up these kinds of gems, long may it continue.

Some familiarity with Observation Duty before going into this game is helpful. The translation of a largely visual puzzle mechanic into a text-based experience is a challenging endeavor but I think Paranoia is off to a good start!

I had a good time exploring each iteration of the room (tasting everything was my favorite part). The game did a good job of testing my attention to detail, gaslighting me and challenging me to look for what's actually there rather than what I expect to find--all hallmarks of the genre. With knowing how many "levels" there were and the clear progression counter tension ramped pretty high in the later attempts. While being a much different play experience than OD, Paranoia captured the feeling of the inspiration source well.

It took me a couple of runs to get through to the end and the "anomalies" I found were on the more obvious side but I think this could be adapted into a more complex play experience well. I liked it!