Steam Next: Parasight

My god it's full of stars

The plain act of turning on and playing a video game is something one embarks on to have fun, primarily. Other factors may worm their way in their, perhaps expectations we place upon ourselves or the game, challenges, maybe even awaiting trails drive us, but if we burn all of that away to mere essential essence, then we come to games for fun. Or maybe that's a little too specific. Perhaps I should hedge my bets and say 'entertainment'. Yes. From every game we can at least expect entertainment. What we don't expect, is for our very frail grasp on reality to be knocked over and shattered like a poorly set stack of dime-store novellas. We don't come to games to have our minds extracted out of our ears and stretched across a concrete pavement to be debased and trod on by parades of passerbys. Why don't we expect these things? Because it would be weird to. And any game which would subject us to that sort of treatment anyway would be weird by association. In that vein, let me introduce you to Parasight.

Okay, so I know I've already mentioned numerous times how, for the Steam Next festival, my routine was to scroll down the list of demos at blinding speed and snap up anything that caught my sight. Never staying long another to take phone numbers, just in the bar, grab a drink and slip away into the night, every antisocial alcoholics dream. (Or just their daily routine I guess. Nothing dream-like about it) I would see logos, maybe art, and that would be the deciding factor. No reading the store page, no checking the genre tags, just dirty snatch and grabs. I've stated this for the record. And yet even then, I swear to you that I do not remember downloading Parasight. I don't remember spying the logo for that briefest of seconds, and I don't remember spotting and noting that title-pun with a dry chuckle. (And trust me, I would have noted, and thus remembered, that title pun with dry chuckle had I seen it.) And yet there it was on my install page one evening. Mysterious. Alluring. That should have been my red flag. It wasn't.

So there I am, installing something which could very easily turn out to be a sentient computer virus that's going to overtake my computer's measly defences, rewrite my harddrive and then use my room as a base from which to stage cyberattacks against the world's governments until it wrests control of all nuclear arms and jump-starts the apocalypse. That was a very real possibility on the table that I risked regardless because I'm just a daredevil like that. And I feel this presence hanging over me, some creeping dread the trails down the valley of my spine and spikes into cold abrasions at every vertebrae. I can't reconcile it, but something is wrong. I don't know what it is, but I shouldn't be downloading this game. All sense says that I have to stop the download, shut of my computer, plug out the Ethernet cable, switch off the router, rip-out the fiber cables in the wall, burn the neighbourhood power junction and probably douse the local BT Internet provider after I'm done for good measure. And that is what I set out to do, before the download abruptly completes. It's only 150mb, what did I expect?

Now you might detect that I'm stalling talking about this game. And that is likely getting frustrating because you're looking at the various screenshots scratching your head and wondering when I'm going to start making sense of this for you, but that's just it. I can't. The images you're gazing at, probably in something approach abject bewilderment, are just snapshots of an experience that made my head throb from start to finish. But let me try and explain that experience to you. The game has broken English, that is a fact, it feels like an intentional one too, I don't know why I say that but I think the developer intends for it to be 'cutesy'. I don't know if they succeeded, I still can't feel things anymore. The demo then makes you choose a save file, but not the first save file because this is a demo and they needed space to put in a splash text to tell you that, and not the second save file because it has to contain the second half of the splash text that reminds you this is a demo, but instead the third save file because that one is free. The colour choice throughout everything, the menus and the game itself, are intentionally psychedelic to unease you and there's almost always just a little too much going on in the background so that you can never just settle and be contented. All of these are my observations before the game has begun.

In gameplay you're looking at a side scrolling adventure game with sword swings, rolling, stamina management and... oh my god it's a souls-like. I'm not even memeing, that is literally how they advertise the thing: as a Souls-like. Well hey, that's some distinguished company this game lines itself shoulder to shoulder with, so that's a good start. Oh, but the tutorial is a featureless hell-scape fraught with abstractology whilst green diamonds from The Sims float in the background. You are taught how to jump over the word 'obstacle' written on the stage, or dodge through a stream of the word 'Arrow' in order to learn that mechanic. You also meet a strange stick man with an arrow in his head who is intent on being your buddy. (or Boody. Because he says it like that.)

At this point maybe you've seen enough of these screenshots to get an impression in your head. Weird characters, dark text boxes, off-beat dialogue; is this like Undertale? I understand the comparison and honestly think that the very same feeling I had when turning on this game is likely comparable to the sense of confusion that early Undertale adopters had. But I don't see this going in a direction like that game did, instead Parasight seems to relish in it's own absurdity and delight in your flailing attempts to categorise and make sense of it all. There may be a story and a world, but I suspect that it all only connects and make sense within the mind of the creator, and by letting us glimpse just a sliver into that world we can see a reality that no other person could design. This game is unique.

Outside of the tutorial there is a little bit of a game, but it follows a design philosophy both standard and abnormal. You awaken in a graveyard and have to go right to parallax the screen to a boss fight, but there are no other enemies, just this boss. You have an utterly cluttered beyond sense inventory screen which reminds me of Cruelty Squad to glimpse at. (in fact, a lot of this game reminds me of Cruelty Squad) The combat, and this is becoming something of a theme with these games, is pretty chop-sticky and lacking in impact, which kind of stands out in a Souls-like game, but is Gameplay even the main draw here? Not really. you're here for the insanity of it all. Oh, and to break another game design standard, after you beat the boss the game expects you to go left to progress. I mean sure, backtracking can be a thing in games like this, but to be the literal second direction you have to go after killing your first enemy? It's genius, how can one developer get so based?

Parasight is a wild Mythical Pokémon that came barrelling out of the sky with no provocation and I absolutely did not stock up on Ultraballs to prepare. And that tease at the end where some guy, who I presume is going to be the main boss, taunts you like a playground bully before skewering you on a sword, pretty much just auto-signed my prescription to anything this game puts out because I need to see it to completion. This experience has to be reach something of a resolution for me, if for no other reason than to help clot up this searing wound to my soul that playing this demo has opened up. I've done a terrible job describing this title, as you've no doubt noticed, but that's just all the more reason why I need to be part of it more, I need to consume it, to have it in my life. I will buy this game, even if no one else does, and after that day I just hope there's enough left of me to report myself back to all of you.