“What’s that
Can’t tell
Hand-held dream
Shot in hell”
—Death Grips, I’ve Seen Footage
“A sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human.”
—Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie
Paratopic is a short, tightly knotted game. Within its brief duration it fragments its narrative across three characters and a nonlinear timeline, a choice which in turn naturally fragments how the player perceives and navigates its spaces. The plot concerns a briefcase of videotapes one character is told to smuggle across a vaguely defined border. Another character sits in a diner patiently loading a revolver before bursting into the back room and shooting a man in the head. Another still is birdwatching in the woods when she stumbles upon something otherworldly.
The game’s fascination with eerie frissons in familiar places, with the intangible border between here and there, evokes, among many other things, the writing of J.G. Ballard. The Ballardian is marked by alienation, masochism, urban structures haunted by emptiness, and the hollow violence of wealth. But where Ballard’s characters were often disaffected upper-class types, Paratopic depicts a precariat milieu of dingy apartments, highway gas stations, and grimy diners. These are the spaces accessible to people with no money, people who may be desperate or disenfranchised or simply passing through. The diner’s windows are clouded with grime, looking out on a city comprised of squat brown buildings where a lone crow pecks at a corpse on the street. A neon sign behind the counter promises hot food, but the “hot” keeps flickering in and out. The gas station is dimly lit and half-stocked, with an attendant who is equally insistent about the existence of aliens and the immorality of wealth.
In his book The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher attempts to define the two titular generic modes. The weird, he writes, is characterized by montage, or “the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together.” H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, David Lynch; for Fisher these artists embody the weird, which springs from Freud’s conception of the “uncanny” in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche. This is to say the “weird,” for all its weirdness, has been comfortably established for over a century.
Fisher’s discussion of the eerie, however, offers new definitions for familiar sensations both real and fictional. The eerie is a “failure of absence” or a “failure of presence.” The eerie concerns itself with questions of agency; of what is acting, if anything, and why, if so. It’s in this sense that I read Paratopic as an eerie text. Its distinct-yet-elusive atmosphere comes from a world where the structures of power are completely obscured. Small details speak as loudly as bold ones: the body in the street; who killed them? Why has no one noticed? The man who gives the smuggler their mission; who does he work for? And why does he have such control over the smuggler?
A conduit for violent desires that play out against the indifferent concrete city
The primary locus of the eerie is the tapes. On a mechanical level a videotape is no mystery—you put it in the VCR and it plays footage—but perverting the familiar is what Paratopic does so well. Thus the function and effect of the tape is completely ambiguous. They clearly carry some transformative charge; the smuggler’s neighbor begs them to give her just one tape. If she gets her way, she’s seen sitting in front of her TV, scooted to the edge of her bed, moaning beneath the glow of the screen before her face splits open like a flower—this appears to be the satisfaction she wanted from the tape. Elsewhere, though, the tapes function differently. They seem to taunt the assassin by replaying the moment of her kill. A customs agent who watches them ends up with a TV fused to his head and a massive vertical gash through his body, the bisected torso lolling limply.
The videotape, mundane and outdated, provides a model for analyzing the game’s banal spaces, which in Ballardian fashion it recontextualizes and makes strange. The recurring image of the highway overpass in Ballard’s Crash is rhapsodically described—“drained and grey;” a “dark cavern,” “cathedral-like” in size; a “serene motion sculpture.” Ballard renders a structure so familiar as to go unnoticed in aesthetic, sensual terms, transforming it into a conduit for violent desires that play out against the indifferent concrete city.
An illicit deal in a diner is a staple of noir fiction. Paratopic’s diner is impossibly dingy and abandoned. On one table are splayed a bunch of printouts of religious icons and architecture (as far as I could tell—the images are heavily pixelated), while on the wall are photos of skylines. The long line of the counter only emphasizes the place’s desolation; no cooks, no servers, no customers. The assassin sees featureless black figures sitting at the counter, beings which seem to be of the same provenance as the one that kills the birdwatcher at the end of the game. Perhaps this is a liminal space for her in the way that Winkie’s Diner in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or Room 47 in his Inland Empire serve as outposts on the border between consciousness and subconsciousness; perhaps her exposure to the faceless being (the game’s one distinctly weird intrusion, in that it firmly does not belong where it is) has stranded her outside her reality.
The intangible border between here and there
The gas station that the smuggler stops at is even less outwardly distinctive than the diner. The player only sees it from the inside; signage on the wall says “Wines” and “Beers,” though the coolers below are dark. In fact the entire store is dark, save for the weak yellow glow from the overhead lights. The cashier is talkative but not ingratiating. He digresses on a wide array of topics depending on how the player responds—he does say the place stays busy since it’s off the highway, but there’s no one to be seen. On both trips the smuggler makes, to and from the border, the cashier asks about their “friend” outside. But the smuggler came alone, driving down the highway until the tapes disappeared from their passenger seat and then driving back.
The plainspoken strangeness of these events speaks to the logic of a world that is simply unlike ours; it is no more or less comprehensible than the world we live in. It is different, ruptured by potentially extraterrestrial agents and reality-altering videotapes. Yet these things are more tangible than the force which directs our reality; what Fisher calls the “eerie entity” of financial capital. “Conjured out of nothing,” Fisher says, capital “exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.”
Without going too far afield, it’s worth expanding on this idea. Along the lines of Fisher, Slavoj Žižek calls capital the “symbolic Real,” in a Lacanian sense. That is, it is the construct we use to make sense of our reality. It is neither Real itself—the Real being a self-negating “primordial abyss”—nor the “imaginary Real,” which is found in the places where reality distorts or fractures to reveal the Real. Fisher’s eerie evokes this imaginary Real, and so too does Paratopic.
It is Paratopic’s understanding of the desperation inflicted by poverty that allows it to cut deeply; the damage wrought by a world predicated on the perpetuation of neoliberal capitalism. Fittingly, the game evokes in this ways both conscious and unconscious. Its characters do desperate things, some—the locals—perhaps spurred by an accident at the nearby power plant that may have invited or conjured the spindly, faceless figure; an accident which the cashier says gutted the local job market.
Capital “exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.”
The form of the game itself is warped; textures swim and crack with aliasing, pixelation and video glitches marking those places where the Real breaks through. Like in Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria, whose phantasmagoric colored lighting design visually represents the malevolent influence of an ancient witch, the image distortions in Paratopic speak to the warping presence of something ethereal and eerie. It swims beneath the surface of things; it hides under their skin.
Paratopic‘s city is a sooty husk, a ruin whose scarce inhabitants eke out day-to-day existence by taking dangerous smuggling jobs, murdering for money, or reconfiguring their flesh in agonized cathode-ray rapture. The eerie suffuses this world, where nothing joins at the seams and intimations of the terrible are everywhere. The faceless being is explicitly “paratopic,” out of place/context, but in its absence this world would not be significantly better off. Precarity warps its victims; it closes off positivity, hopefulness, and desire against a person’s best instincts. It forecloses their futures. It makes them all ghosts in their own lives, drifting between the only places they can access and finding solace in negation.
The newest issue of Heterotopias, 004 is out now, and in it’s focus on landscape includes pieces on The Witcher 3, Kentucky Route Zero, Night in The Woods and more. Get it here.
Thank you for your support!
“What’s that
Can’t tell
Hand-held dream
Shot in hell”
—Death Grips, I’ve Seen Footage
“A sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human.”
—Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie
Paratopic is a short, tightly knotted game. Within its brief duration it fragments its narrative across three characters and a nonlinear timeline, a choice which in turn naturally fragments how the player perceives and navigates its spaces. The plot concerns a briefcase of videotapes one character is told to smuggle across a vaguely defined border. Another character sits in a diner patiently loading a revolver before bursting into the back room and shooting a man in the head. Another still is birdwatching in the woods when she stumbles upon something otherworldly.
The game’s fascination with eerie frissons in familiar places, with the intangible border between here and there, evokes, among many other things, the writing of J.G. Ballard. The Ballardian is marked by alienation, masochism, urban structures haunted by emptiness, and the hollow violence of wealth. But where Ballard’s characters were often disaffected upper-class types, Paratopic depicts a precariat milieu of dingy apartments, highway gas stations, and grimy diners. These are the spaces accessible to people with no money, people who may be desperate or disenfranchised or simply passing through. The diner’s windows are clouded with grime, looking out on a city comprised of squat brown buildings where a lone crow pecks at a corpse on the street. A neon sign behind the counter promises hot food, but the “hot” keeps flickering in and out. The gas station is dimly lit and half-stocked, with an attendant who is equally insistent about the existence of aliens and the immorality of wealth.
In his book The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher attempts to define the two titular generic modes. The weird, he writes, is characterized by montage, or “the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together.” H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, David Lynch; for Fisher these artists embody the weird, which springs from Freud’s conception of the “uncanny” in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche. This is to say the “weird,” for all its weirdness, has been comfortably established for over a century.
Fisher’s discussion of the eerie, however, offers new definitions for familiar sensations both real and fictional. The eerie is a “failure of absence” or a “failure of presence.” The eerie concerns itself with questions of agency; of what is acting, if anything, and why, if so. It’s in this sense that I read Paratopic as an eerie text. Its distinct-yet-elusive atmosphere comes from a world where the structures of power are completely obscured. Small details speak as loudly as bold ones: the body in the street; who killed them? Why has no one noticed? The man who gives the smuggler their mission; who does he work for? And why does he have such control over the smuggler?
The primary locus of the eerie is the tapes. On a mechanical level a videotape is no mystery—you put it in the VCR and it plays footage—but perverting the familiar is what Paratopic does so well. Thus the function and effect of the tape is completely ambiguous. They clearly carry some transformative charge; the smuggler’s neighbor begs them to give her just one tape. If she gets her way, she’s seen sitting in front of her TV, scooted to the edge of her bed, moaning beneath the glow of the screen before her face splits open like a flower—this appears to be the satisfaction she wanted from the tape. Elsewhere, though, the tapes function differently. They seem to taunt the assassin by replaying the moment of her kill. A customs agent who watches them ends up with a TV fused to his head and a massive vertical gash through his body, the bisected torso lolling limply.
The videotape, mundane and outdated, provides a model for analyzing the game’s banal spaces, which in Ballardian fashion it recontextualizes and makes strange. The recurring image of the highway overpass in Ballard’s Crash is rhapsodically described—“drained and grey;” a “dark cavern,” “cathedral-like” in size; a “serene motion sculpture.” Ballard renders a structure so familiar as to go unnoticed in aesthetic, sensual terms, transforming it into a conduit for violent desires that play out against the indifferent concrete city.
An illicit deal in a diner is a staple of noir fiction. Paratopic’s diner is impossibly dingy and abandoned. On one table are splayed a bunch of printouts of religious icons and architecture (as far as I could tell—the images are heavily pixelated), while on the wall are photos of skylines. The long line of the counter only emphasizes the place’s desolation; no cooks, no servers, no customers. The assassin sees featureless black figures sitting at the counter, beings which seem to be of the same provenance as the one that kills the birdwatcher at the end of the game. Perhaps this is a liminal space for her in the way that Winkie’s Diner in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or Room 47 in his Inland Empire serve as outposts on the border between consciousness and subconsciousness; perhaps her exposure to the faceless being (the game’s one distinctly weird intrusion, in that it firmly does not belong where it is) has stranded her outside her reality.
The gas station that the smuggler stops at is even less outwardly distinctive than the diner. The player only sees it from the inside; signage on the wall says “Wines” and “Beers,” though the coolers below are dark. In fact the entire store is dark, save for the weak yellow glow from the overhead lights. The cashier is talkative but not ingratiating. He digresses on a wide array of topics depending on how the player responds—he does say the place stays busy since it’s off the highway, but there’s no one to be seen. On both trips the smuggler makes, to and from the border, the cashier asks about their “friend” outside. But the smuggler came alone, driving down the highway until the tapes disappeared from their passenger seat and then driving back.
The plainspoken strangeness of these events speaks to the logic of a world that is simply unlike ours; it is no more or less comprehensible than the world we live in. It is different, ruptured by potentially extraterrestrial agents and reality-altering videotapes. Yet these things are more tangible than the force which directs our reality; what Fisher calls the “eerie entity” of financial capital. “Conjured out of nothing,” Fisher says, capital “exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.”
Without going too far afield, it’s worth expanding on this idea. Along the lines of Fisher, Slavoj Žižek calls capital the “symbolic Real,” in a Lacanian sense. That is, it is the construct we use to make sense of our reality. It is neither Real itself—the Real being a self-negating “primordial abyss”—nor the “imaginary Real,” which is found in the places where reality distorts or fractures to reveal the Real. Fisher’s eerie evokes this imaginary Real, and so too does Paratopic.
It is Paratopic’s understanding of the desperation inflicted by poverty that allows it to cut deeply; the damage wrought by a world predicated on the perpetuation of neoliberal capitalism. Fittingly, the game evokes in this ways both conscious and unconscious. Its characters do desperate things, some—the locals—perhaps spurred by an accident at the nearby power plant that may have invited or conjured the spindly, faceless figure; an accident which the cashier says gutted the local job market.
The form of the game itself is warped; textures swim and crack with aliasing, pixelation and video glitches marking those places where the Real breaks through. Like in Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria, whose phantasmagoric colored lighting design visually represents the malevolent influence of an ancient witch, the image distortions in Paratopic speak to the warping presence of something ethereal and eerie. It swims beneath the surface of things; it hides under their skin.
Paratopic‘s city is a sooty husk, a ruin whose scarce inhabitants eke out day-to-day existence by taking dangerous smuggling jobs, murdering for money, or reconfiguring their flesh in agonized cathode-ray rapture. The eerie suffuses this world, where nothing joins at the seams and intimations of the terrible are everywhere. The faceless being is explicitly “paratopic,” out of place/context, but in its absence this world would not be significantly better off. Precarity warps its victims; it closes off positivity, hopefulness, and desire against a person’s best instincts. It forecloses their futures. It makes them all ghosts in their own lives, drifting between the only places they can access and finding solace in negation.
The newest issue of Heterotopias, 004 is out now, and in it’s focus on landscape includes pieces on The Witcher 3, Kentucky Route Zero, Night in The Woods and more. Get it here.
Thank you for your support!
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