![]() Then, suddenly, I’m miles away, on the other side of another jump cut. A short scene shows the woman sitting alone in her room, accompanied by the sound of static. The woman’s voice returns, behind me now. Once I open the lock, I can see what’s inside. It’s a black case with a white symbol on top. A woman greets me, saying there’s something waiting for me in my room. I walk down the corridor of a decaying motel. ![]() But once I got my hands on the game, I finally understood its meaning. At first, it sounded like it was merely an inside joke for those who played Paratopic. “Don’t watch the tapes,” was a tagline often repeated as part of developer Arbitrary Metric’s social media campaign. You discover a briefcase filled with VHS tapes, the object of a mysterious and unhealthy obsession among the people you encounter. You sit in a diner talking with a man whose face gets closer with every dialogue transition. At less than an hour, it’s an eerie trip that jumps in between abrupt camera cuts, taking you through scenes that don’t make much sense during your first playthrough. Paratopic lets you see through the eyes of three different individuals, each tangled in their own tale of horror and regret. One of them is carrying a gun.Īn assassin. They begin to talk, but you don’t understand them. The three faces look at you for a moment, quiet. But it’s also possible to disrupt them even further by using magnetic fields-so much so that any sense they’re connected to real events has been worn away. Once you find what you need, you’re free to stop the tapes and forget they exist. When you play them, you become a temporary prisoner of whatever reality they contain, rewinding and distorting the world around you, clicking to collect hidden gems and other items you’ll need to slot into the sterile world of the factories. You can only progress through puzzles by manipulating the cassette tapes you discover. But its reliance on analog tapes and the way they shift over time lend an unsettling quality to the experience. Small Radios Big Televisions is not, strictly speaking, a horror game. Dillon Rogers, the developer behind the survival horror title Gloomwood, has argued on Twitter that “the compression and physical corruption of VHS makes it a flexible aesthetic for horror.” It’s these juxtapositions-between the inherent credibility of analog media and the sense it might be deceiving you, and between intentional corruption and organic decay-that make tapes such fertile ground for video games, especially those that seek to unsettle or frighten us. Nature, too, is a video editor: The passage of time, with the help of humidity and high temperatures, undermines the magnetic organization of a videotape, modifying both image and sound. Even before hundreds of digital tools for modifying recordings, analog videos could also be altered, subverting the snapshots of reality they purported to hold. In our age of Photoshop and deepfakes, we tend to think of digital media as uniquely corruptible and easily manipulated, but physical media wasn’t infallible, either. By 2016, when the last company manufacturing VHS tapes, Funai, ceased production, the format had been around for 40 years. Aspiring movie makers toyed around with the new possibilities opened up by this technological democratization. Throughout the era, recorders became more affordable, and families began to capture their own memories for posterity. Tapes were a popular medium for distributing movies (and even some games) for decades, becoming commonplace throughout the ’80s and ’90s. The problem is, there’s no way to prove that any of these scenes ever really existed. Then, a shore that invites you to play with its pines, stretching them and distorting what seems to be one of the few remaining pieces of a lost memory. A calm trip down a road in the middle of nowhere. ![]() A big tree in a dark forest, leaves floating in the air with a black tint. The puzzles within all center on seemingly abandoned machinery, all switches to flip and valves to turn.īut there are also cassette tapes scattered around, apparently serving as windows into what the world used to look like before. From a pulled-back viewpoint, you spin around factory towers, clicking on doors to shift to an equally detached side view of the interior rooms. In fact, your interactions with the game play out from a decidedly nonhuman perspective. Small Radios Big Televisions pictures the aftermath of a world gone wrong. The sound grows louder and louder as the figures get closer to the camera. A noise repeats in the background, but you can’t quite make out where it’s coming from. Distorted figures appear within the frame, splashed by green and purple stains. An image fades into view, but what it’s supposed to depict is unclear.
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