What does this Polish firstperson narrative game have to do with John Milton’s epic poem? Aside from the glimpse of a book’s spine in the opening cutscene – embossed letters spelling out the name of the author soon lost in a flurry of snow as the camera pulls out to reveal an endless frozen wasteland – we’re not quite sure. Even if we had to pick a literary work of biblical fan fiction to allude to, surely this descent beneath the earth, down through multiple levels of past sins, is more Inferno than Paradise Lost? Admittedly, Szymon, the recently orphaned boy you shepherd through the game’s underground environs, isn’t midway along the journey of his life, one way or the other. But, like Dante, he enters this underworld at ground level and works down from there, meeting his own Virgil along the way. You might notice we’re talking around the exact contents of these tunnels and caverns, and for good reason: discovering what lies beneath is by far the greatest pleasure Paradise Lost has to offer.

Suffice it to say, it begins with a bunker, its walls blighted with swastikas and Parteiadler eagles, and gets stranger as you go deeper. An early discovery: the Nazi Party has survived into the 1960s, and still holds power in Germany. Yes, we’re in alternate-history territory, with a ‘what if’ that has been asked many times over, but, in the case of Paradise Lost, it’s at least being asked in a fresh voice. PolyAmorous is based in Warsaw, a city that was razed by the Luftwaffe, and the studio knows its history. The game’s underground setting, known as Gesellschaft, has its roots in the real-life Project Riese, Nazi constructions dug into the mountains of what is now Poland and abandoned at the end of the war, their intended purpose still unknown. The plot, and supporting documents found around the world, reference Heinrich Himmler, Slavic mythology, the theft of Kraków’s Veit Stoss altarpiece, a secret expedition to Tibet, the Nazis’ belief in Atlantis, and a hollow Earth. (We’ll confess to being drawn into a second descent, down the rabbit holes of Wikipedia.) In a setting that otherwise leans on a lot of stock elements (nuclear winter, heavy vault doors, warring factions), these threads add much-needed specificity. Still, we’re not quite sure the game ever earns the quantity of Nazi paraphernalia on show, nor the rawer aspects of history it plays with, because ultimately it turns out Gesellschaft’s story isn’t the one in which Paradise Lost is interested.