As exciting as being an investigator sounds, a huge chunk of it is simply going around the island collecting junk and interrogating characters/suspects whenever possible.

Kaizen Game Works partly describes Paradise Killer as an open-world exploration game, and the exploration part is no joke. You’ll need to seriously comb through every area or you’ll miss something. And it’ll probably be something important. Case in point: in my first playthrough, I missed one thing – ONE THING – and “solved” the mystery by accusing the wrong person and went about my merry way. After the trial, I was goofing off and came across *redacted* and my character said, “Oh, I should have noticed this before the trial”. OH REALLY? asdfasdkjfhsdjkfhsdjkfhsdjkfhksj

In some ways the need to find clues is like a throwback to the good old days of pixel hunting [being forced to find items in old 2D adventure games by mousing around the screen]. No, it’s not particularly difficult, just occasionally tedious and frustrating due to clues being in the most random places AND the fact that there are day/night weather cycles and you can’t see crap at night.

While puttering about the island, you’ll also come across plenty of “blood crystals”. These are the main currency on the island and used for everything from buying secrets and sodas to fast traveling. Yep, you need currency to unlock fast travel locations AND to travel each time. The game is pretty fair with the amount of crystals lying around, but I’m not a huge fan of this design since the whole point of fast traveling is to let players save time going back and forth; having to examine every nook and cranny for Thomas’ English Crystals kind of makes that moot.

Aside from finding clues, chatting with the other characters on the island serves as your main vehicle for figuring out what people are up to. There isn’t a whole lot of complexity in the dialogue – the choices that you make in conversations don’t matter, so you end up just blasting through all the options until there’s nothing left.

Like Danganronpa, you can also opt to Hang Out with any of the characters – and you’re probably supposed to, even though the game doesn’t really mention this for some reason – because at some point they’ll give you an important clue or two that you can use later in the trial.

One of the more notable features in Paradise Killer is the ability to start the trial at any point in the game. This lets you end the game whenever you feel you have enough evidence. I suppose this is a novel addition, since you don’t necessarily need to have all the evidence to convict the killer.