So the stated influences of this game, Silent Hill and 30 Flights of Loving, are both games that I love - like, 30 Flights is one of my favourite games of all time, and Brendon Chung is, maybe, one of the best game designers working today, in my opinion. But with what elements and eccentricities emphasized do those game succeed enormously, Paratopic rides the, few, admittedly, foibles that have minorly dragged on the meteoric heights Silent Hill and 30 Flights reach. The art design of Paratopic immures the PSX immersion that only 1999 and the childlike holistically accepting verisimilitude combo could deliver in Silent Hill, but wherein the usage is grand, the actual representation feels meeker and, frankly, sophomoric. The sound design doesn't equally reflect the crystalline impressionism of a poorly wrapped world in comprehensible tinsel, instead sounding like what it is, a VO team that wrote a scary script first and affected scary performances without respect to their reach. In fact, I kind of feel that the nostalgia and referential titillation of media just, you know, older is kind of the driver of the monotony here. The tapes, the 'Friendo', the graphical design - it all smacks of childlike fear of the unknown which is only unknown because of youthful ignorance and not human incapacities. As far as 30 Flights goes, the jarring editing cuts therein works due to the nature of the narrative demanding the oneiric retrospection of a job, and life, decidedly not well lived - as well as informing the player of the broadness of a reality and lived in surreality that weaves more capaciously than Paratopic can manage by cutting across fewer locations with more consistent grounding and firmament. I don't know, it just felt a bit spaced out to me.