Roman Sands & Paratopic Overdub Header
Image: Arbitrary Metric & Serenity Forge

This week, two games I'd been looking forward to came out, both from tiny indie outfit Arbitrary Metric. On the same day, too. And as they're both horror experiences about navigating fragmented, crumbling realities, why not take a look at them together? If you're up for something weird and spooky, I'd honestly recommend you dive in blind into both Roman Sands RE:Build and Paratopic: Overdub blind, but if you want to know what you're getting into, here's my thoughts after seven hours of the former, and two hours of the latter.

Paratopic: Overdub

Let's start with the smaller (clocking in at under two hours for most), and more familiar of the two. Paratopic: Overdub is an expanded remake of 2018's Paratopic. A game that was doing liminal spaces and 'Haunted PS1' aesthetics long before those became a trend. It also feels like an especially experimental Cronenberg film that you're helplessly trapped in. And if that sounds like your sort of thing, you'll probably love it.

With a perspective hopping between characters often without telling you who you're playing as, and a world seemingly as broken as the narrative, you're intentionally left to fill in the gaps, the time-skips and the inferences of its environmental storytelling for yourself. And depending how active your imagination is, the answers can be upsetting, especially during the long, quiet night-driving segments where you've only got a long, dark road and a radio full of garbled non-words to distract you from those thoughts. This game knows when to let you stew in your own anxieties.

Primarily though, you're playing as an unfortunate someone, tasked with driving a suitcase full of videotapes across the country for a highly threatening client. Videotapes that are highly sought after. Tapes that some people beg to view like they're helplessly addicted. Tapes that change and kill people. Tapes that move and shift on their own. One moment you're on the road, fiddling with your car radio, next the game smash-cuts to another perspective as you(?) walk through a forest, or wander a motel complex, or sit at a diner table, loading shells one at a time into a revolver.

It's still as beautifully unsettling as it was back in 2018. While character models might look a little more like human beings (where appropriate), their distorted, mumbling and barely-coherent voices are as uncanny as ever. The world is also just slightly more detailed, maybe leaning into early PS2-era aesthetics, but that just allows a little bit more Silent Hill to bleed through. This world is crumbling, taking the aesthetics of the American rust belt just that little bit too far. Massive cowboy scarecrow effigies dot the border. People talk of a Zone expanding. Strange red fibrous moss grows in bathrooms and areas of decay. Sometimes the land splinters.

I'll probably be replaying this one a couple more times, just to see what I can piece together, but I don't think Paratopic has any concrete answers. It has characters, it has dialogue, it has events that sometimes feel apocalyptic, but nothing quite fits together cleanly. It's a testament to the quality of Paratopic that this new version (somewhat longer, slightly prettier) still holds up even when games about wandering liminal spaces with crunchy PSX visuals are commonplace. Plus, I played it just before bed and yes, it did give me some troubling dreams...

Roman Sands: RE:Build

Speaking of dreams, it's time to get swept up in a vaporwave haze. The real heavyweight today is Roman Sands RE:Build, which I am a little over seven hours into, and with absolutely zero idea how much deeper its rabbit hole goes, but it feels like there's a long road yet to walk. Once again, it's a game that has you asking "Who am I?", "What am I doing here?" and "Why is everyone so goddamn weird?" off the bat, but much quicker to answer those queries. Firmly informing you, in fact, whether you like it or not.

You are a concierge at the Roman Sands resort hotel. Possibly the only employee. What you're doing is rushing around with limited time, seeing to the needs of the guests - four eccentric retirees - who are seemingly living their best life while an ever-expanding sun threatens to devour all. As for why everyone's so weird? None of this might be real, and your first hint is that this is a synthwave fever-dream, framed with a HUD straight out of a Y2K rhythm game and accompanied by a fittingly manic high-energy soundtrack.

But you're being lied to. The UI itself is an antagonist, forcing you into a role, as cheerfully menacing as a corporation informing you that we're all family here, and if you say anything wrong about daddy CEO, you're out on the street. Even as flashing bonus objectives pop up, you don't need to sprint from point to point, unless you're chasing the small experience bonuses that come from Efficient Work and being a Good Employee. At the end of each day, you walk into the sea, the expanding, sinking sun widening to consume you, and spit you out again.

Once more you begin at the start of the loop with (most) of your possessions reset and your overly demanding customers back repeating their routines, maybe to be helped further by an upgrade or new feature unlocked as a reward for your work. In reality, this is a point-and-click adventure, and while serving the guests can help progress things, unraveling the nature of your reality and how to break out of it quickly becomes the priority.

And it's pretty dang solid as a point-and-click adventure, too. Classic inventory puzzles, single-screen logic challenges, and a few more esoteric leaps of logic. Alchemical symbols, planetary alignments, organs and humors - the puzzles lean into the strange themes and messaging, and I hope there's more juicy stuff like this to look forward to.

Aesthetically, this game is a triumph and several victory laps on top of that. The resort sections are depicted in maybe five different wildly clashing art-styles. Depending on whether they're 3D models in the world, UI elements or dialogue sprites, the guests can either be noodly-armed cartoon caricatures, cute Y2K miniatures that would look great on a phone-charm, or highly expressive '90s anime characters, VHS artifacting and all. It feels like looking at shards of the same character through a kaleidoscope. This confused artifice is part of the story, too. It doesn't take long to figure out that you're in some kind of patchwork existence.

As for why, I don't know. At seven hours in, I've crossed the threshold into Act 2, which the game's trailer and store page arguably show too much of. Not to spoil too much (again, if you're intrigued at all, I've had a great time already and recommend it), but I miss the crotchety old folks at the resort. I miss the chaotic collision of aesthetics. I am now more grounded here. While doing near-thankless concierge work had its own stresses, being stuck in an irradiated, sealed research pod in the ocean, managing limited oxygen while cannibalizing my environment for spare parts to consume, is worse. The 'horrors lurking under the surface' are now all around me, and the tonal shift is powerful.

I have a feeling that I'll be returning to the hotel and everything will... okay, not make sense, but dovetail coherently enough to carry me to the end. But I honestly have no idea how much longer the game is, how many more layers I can expect to find, or even whether this second existence is real or not. All I know is that I really want to find out and see more. This one has its hooks DEEP into me.

Roman Sands RE:Build is out now for £15/$15, while Paratopic: Overdub will cost you £7.49/$7.49, both with a 10% discount running until September 30th. And, of course, you can snag the two together and save a bit. Also, that's not how exchange rates work, Serenity Forge... Roman Sands is also available on Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox.