Paper Beast allows players to lose themselves inside pastel daydreams of soft shapes and delicate zoology. They could also lose patience with some tedious mechanics and suspicious tests of logic. Paper Beast is full of gratifying ingenuity, beautiful optimism, and elegant communication. And maybe an overabundance of zealous whimsy.
There’s a moment in Paper Beast’s opening act where I was dramatically unsure if a large, eight-legged creature was either going to befriend me or eat me. A body constructed of twisted, paper mache and a presence of menacing predation suggested Paper Beast was using virtual reality as a pathway for fear and intimidation. I braced for impact, but the creature simply passed me by. As a player I was god in this world, but, in respect to its autonomous inhabitants, I didn’t really matter. The residents of Paper Beast, as it turns out, are indifferent to my existence.
Paper Beast is a first-person puzzle game from Pixel Reef, a French studio founded by Éric Chahi. It combines the serene, alien landscapes of Chahi’s Out of this World and Heart of Darkness with the open-ended terraforming mechanics and environmental puzzles of From Dust. In Paper Beast, no voice ever speaks and no direction is ever explicitly provided. There is confidence that, by experimenting with the tools available on the environmental cues on display, players will intuit their way across six levels. The addition of virtual reality helps, and hurts, Paper Beast’s chances of meeting this objective.
Familiar points of control compose Paper Beast’s methods of interaction. With a DualShock 4 or a set of Move controllers, players can short-distance teleport around as a means of locomotion. Shifting the point of view, in the interest of comfort, is limited to blocked, non-smooth movement. Paper Beast’s core action, picking things up, is accomplished by reaching out with considerable distance and dragging objects with a wire, the length of which can be increased or decreased with the D-Pad. Walking around, grabbing objects, and figuring out it all can affect the environment composes most of Paper Beast’s activity.
The creature that greets the player at Paper Beast’s opening is an invitation to a weird world of paper-crafted alien animals. The papyvorus are weightless, horse-like beings that travel in packs and generally provide the player with waypoints. They’re attracted to lures found out in the world, susceptible to wind blowing over steep cliffs, and vulnerable to harlequin predators roaming open areas. Not all of Paper Beast’s challenges are focused on getting papyvorus from A to B, but ensuring their general safety is frequent goal.
On more than one instance I solved a problem by simply picking up a beast and moving it past danger. For other challenges, direct action is not possible. A worm like creature can transfer sand and water from one end to the other, allowing the player to dam one area while filling another with liquid. Mysterious spheres can force intense heat on blocks of ice and freezing temperatures on bodies of water. Linking objects to other objects and binding their fate together is also an option. Paper Beast is in love with its set of tools and delights, and often rewards, a player interested enough to experiment with any sensible idea.
Paper Beast tries its best to let players feel out its world and discover what all of it means. The downside to this approach is that missing a detail that isn’t reinforced anywhere else may create a significant wall to progress. One level involved moving some papyvorus over a windy cliff. Heavy-turtle creatures were slowly moving on the top of the cliff, and I thought dangling their young (which they were attracted to) at the top of the cliff would create a barrier to the wind and allow the papyvorus to pass through. This, and every combination of a similar action I tried for half an hour, was incorrect. Days later, I restarted the entire level and saw a one-time action being telegraphed that provided a perfect solution. Getting trapped inside of virtual reality with no instinctive path forward was not a particularly great feeling.
There were other instances when I was impressed with the amount of agency Paper Beast allowed and the amount of space in which it let me experiment. Dealing with water physics and different water volumes can be messy and chaotic, but Paper Beast seemed to perfectly ride the line between having confidence in a plan and the anxiety that it will never work. With a sand-spewing mud ball and a mysterious rubix cube I was able to allow some candy-shell crabs to safely ford a river that, from the outset, I had absolutely no idea how to deal with. Finding the proper tools, learning what they do, and using them to solve what might be the problem is a perfect thesis of videogame design. Conducting a weird experiment and watching it work can make a person feel like a genius.
The remainder of Paper Beast focuses on maintaining the player’s connection to its strange world. The point of its virtual reality to see its creatures up close and try to form a connection with their presence. You’re better incentivized to care about them if you notice the black-tape creature rolling around looks like a sheep dog or if you happen to witness a turtle fall prey to a red-diamond dragon. It’s about being in the otherworldly space and acting with a measure of responsibility over its inhabitants. They will never say thank you, but you just may get to watch them all have a parade.
Paper Beast also features a Sandbox mode. Finding hidden colorful jack-like objects in the campaign makes an object from the world available in Sandbox mode. The player can drop in papyvorus and predators, make it rain or storm, and plant any number of trees. All of these objects and environments have specific properties that allow them to interact with each other, which, when combined with terraforming tools and a zoomed-out god mode, could create a chaotically interesting toy box world. I preferred the focused and constructed nature of Paper Beast’s proper campaign, but Sandbox provides a neato set of tools to mess around with should someone seek a greater level of investment.
Despite struggling with some of its objectives, when the credits rolled on Paper Beast it was difficult not to be overwhelmed with the affirmation that it was all worth my time. It ends in the most implausible of places by way of the more eccentric processions I’ve witnessed. Paper Beast nears the edge of pretension, but the goofy veneer of playfulness amid the crushing ferocity of its world pulls it back just in time. The player is ultimately left with a strange sense of hope, which the last thing anyone might expect in a game where they play as a god.
Paper Beast allows players to lose themselves inside pastel daydreams of soft shapes and delicate zoology. They could also lose patience with some tedious mechanics and suspicious tests of logic. Paper Beast is full of gratifying ingenuity, beautiful optimism, and elegant communication. And maybe an overabundance of zealous whimsy.
