Despite its inelegant name, Paranoihell is a stellar piece of short-form horror.
Created by indie developer games by lum, this pixelates top-down horror game casts players as Erica, a young woman working at a dive bar in a dying city. One night as Erica is ending her shift and shutting the place down for the night, she encounters a creepy man who indicates that he knows her route home. Then, he disappears. Frightened, Erica resolves to get home quickly to check in on her girlfriend, Morgan.
Shortly after exiting the bar, though, Erica finds that things in the city have gone eerily sideways. A crimson void covers portions of the street, blocking her most direct path home. A police officer, animated by a zombie-like ferocity, attempts to kill her. Strange creatures and shambling possessed cops roam the city and attack on site.
As you try to find a way home, you’ll discover weapons that you can use to fend off your slinking attackers. Each weapon, be it a meat cleaver, ax, knife or shovel, handles basically the same, with an excruciating pause as Erica winds up and a satisfying smack when she lands a blow. You can hold the attack button to store up power, rendering the pause even more excruciating and the smack more satisfying. The timing takes some getting used to, and, especially on the harder difficulty settings, it’s easy to get wrecked by a speedy enemy.
Weapons degrade and break over time, but I almost always had at least one spare stashed away. The real challenge isn’t, actually, having enough weapons to survive, but figuring out how to manage your puny inventory when you collect too many. As the game begins, you can only carry three objects. You’ll have to store the rest in a chest which, Resident Evil-style, can be accessed at any other chest on the map.
Paranoihell swaps out the progress-recording typewriters of an RE game for bathroom sinks scattered around the city in abandoned buildings (a friendly reminder, in the era of COVID-19, that washing hands saves lives). As you continue to explore, you’ll unlock shortcuts which make it easier to venture out from a save point. Also as in Resident Evil, you’ll need to find strange tools and keys throughout the city in order to access new areas.
All of this combines to create a fantastic loop. The sense of danger that hangs over the city makes the moment when you finally find a checkpoint exhilarating. Opening a shortcut is as thrilling as in any of From Software’s games, and finding the right key to unlock the right door is as satisfying as in the best Metroidvanias. And the unwieldy nature of the weapons makes surviving a battle feel like a real accomplishment.
And all of this takes place in a genuinely creepy world. Generally, I subscribe to the theory that horror games benefit from being in 3D, building a sense of dread and vulnerability by placing you in a world that stretches in around your character. But, through unsettling art and clever sound design, Paranoihell delivers both a spine-tingling world and pulse-quickening jump scares.
Paranoihell isn’t long, but it packs an impressive punch into its three-hour runtime. Games by lum’s little horror game isn’t the the biggest surprise of my 2020 — that’s, you know, *gestures at everything* — but it is the best one so far.
Paranoihell review code provided by the publisher for PC.
Paranoihell is out now on PC via itch.io and Steam.