Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory Review

I think it’s safe to say everyone agrees that 2020 is the most futuristic-sounding year we’ve had since the year 2000. Thanks to overly optimistic sci-fi writers of the past, the year 2020 conjures images of flying cars, robotic servants and entire meals contained in pills. So, in celebration of the coming of this incredibly futuristic year, I decided to play Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory, a game set in a horrible future where all humans live in one massive building complex, following the orders of an all-powerful AI.

Based on the Paranoia tabletop role-playing game by Greg Costikyan, Dan Geiber, and Eric Goldberg, Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory puts players in the wildly dangerous shoes of a Troubleshooter of Alpha Complex. Alpha Complex is a utopia run by Friend Computer, a massive artificial intelligence who is everyone’s friend. Friend Computer has a number of rules that all citizens of Alpha Complex must follow and any citizen who violates too many rules is labeled a Traitor and visited by the Troubleshooters for a scheduled termination. Termination is not the end, as Friend Computer is caring and benevolent, so all citizens of Alpha Complex have five clones that can be activated upon the death of the currently active body. Sadly, Alpha Complex is woefully inefficient and many of Friend Computer’s rules conflict with others, so players must maintain a shaky balance of violating just enough rules to apprehend the Traitor but not violate so many rules that they are labeled a Traitor themselves.

The main loop of Paranoia is the missions Friend Computer tasks the player with completing. At the beginning of every “daycycle”, which is an unspecified amount of time due to the fact that the sky cannot be seen through the ceiling of Alpha Complex, players are told what traitors they must hunt down. Then, players assemble a team of three specialists to accompany them on the mission. I like the specialists because they are each built to excel in one area of the skill tree, so players can build their skills however they want and still have a well-rounded team. The missions themselves are interesting and do a good job of showing the dysfunctional world of Alpha Complex. A good example of this is a mission where players must access a database to get a name of a citizen who has turned Traitor. Unfortunately, the database terminal is behind a door that can’t be opened until the right form has been filled out, but the required form is behind that same door. After navigating the inefficient official channels, it turns out players must participate in a Robot Wars-style showdown to persuade an official to bypass official procedure to complete the mission. Of course, bypassing official procedure is treasonous, as is participating in a robot showdown, hosting a robot showdown, watching a robot showdown, or having knowledge of a robot showdown. All missions, especially this one, do a great job of illustrating life among the self-contradictory rules of Friend Computer and the terrible world it rules over. As for the combat itself, Paranoia follows in the footsteps of FTL: Faster Than Light with real-time tactical warfare that can be paused at any time to let players collect themselves and plan their next moves. The combat itself is nothing special, fully functional while not having any revolutionary ideas.

I think the most noteworthy flaw with Paranoia is that it doesn’t seem like it had enough resources. I don’t make video games so I don’t know exactly what this game could have used more of, whether it be development staff, budget, time, or something else, but it feels like a game that was pushed out of the nest too soon. The most frustrating manifestation of this is the game’s save system. When the player dies, they can decide whether they would like to retry the mission they were in the process of completing or using a new clone. If a player doesn’t want to use one of their limited pool of clones, retrying the mission sends players back to the very beginning of the mission because there are no checkpoints or manual saving. This is supremely annoying, because the missions usually take the better part of an hour. I think if I had been able to decide where in the mission I would like to load in upon death, my opinion of this game would be much more positive. Another big problem with Paranoia is how many things aren’t explained to the player. A good portion of necessary information is kept in the Alphapedia, a database players must learn to use in order to find out important things like how to get more skill points. As I’ve said in several reviews before, if I have to stop playing a game to read about how to play the game for more than a few minutes, the developers have messed up. Other things aren’t explained at all. My personal favorite of these is that there is no way to tell how many times a gun can be fired before it needs to be reloaded. In a game where players are shooting very frequently, figuring out how much ammo I have shouldn’t be a challenge.

Another shortcoming of Paranoia is its attempts at humor. One of the earliest missions in the game is called “Underwatch.” The mission itself is about trying to fix the programming of a cleaning robot, but the mission title as well as notes left for the player go out of their way to take a shot at Overwatch, a wildly successful video game that came out four years ago. Overwatch has been out so long it’s been the focal point of a political scandal and had a sequel announced, so these jokes feel both dated and honestly a bit embarrassing. I’m all for punching up, but a fly won’t bother an elephant no matter how hard it tries. Later on, there is a joke in a conversation with R&D about Ashton Kutcher’s show Punk’d. Though the show has been off and on the air over the past 17 years, Kutcher hasn’t been the host since 2007. When I read this, I was genuinely stunned at such a dated reference, after all entirely new human beings have been born and hit puberty since this joke was relevant. Possibly the worst of all of these “jokes” is Alphabook, a parody of Facebook that players use to review the stats of themselves and their specialists. I got the feeling that the developers thought this was a scathing parody, but at this point Facebook is a parody of itself, in the news for willingly spreading misinformation and its creator was even called before Congress, so this snarky knock-off doesn’t make much of an impact.

I’ve said it often enough that it might soon become a motto, but I don’t know what it’s like to make video games but I imagine it’s hard. I don’t think the developers of Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory set out to make a mediocre game, but they definitely needed more resources. I think that, though the humor doesn’t always land and players have to do homework to learn all the game’s systems, the gameplay and overall theme warrant a play. I just don’t think people should pay all of the $30 price tag.

Buy this game on sale

It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking