Pariah

About Pariah

Pariah features standard first-person shooter gameplay, largely influenced by the Unreal franchise, particularly Unreal 2 (whose game engine Pariah is based on). The single-player and multiplayer modes include drivable vehicles that can be utilized in combat scenarios. One of the standout features is the incorporation of collectible weapon energy cores, which are used to upgrade the player's weapons, granting them additional features and increased power. Each weapon in the game can be upgraded a maximum of three times.

Pariah notably omits to explain key background information about the plot and the in-game universe to the player, thus causing much of the story to progress without any context or background for the player to identify with. Even at the end of the game, many key plot points remain largely unexplained, leaving it up to the player to conjecture about what really happened.

The game takes place 30 years after mankind fought a devastating war against an enemy known as "The Shroud". Exactly who or what the Shroud are is never actually explained. At the end of the game, they are shown to be hairless humans with corpse-white skin and highly advanced technology, although whether they are aliens, terrorists, mutants, or something else is never clearly revealed. Supposedly, the Shroud were vanquished 30 years ago, but their reappearance toward the end of the game indicates that this is not true.

In the wake of the war, a large portion of the Earth is now an uncivilized wasteland known as "the Zone", inhabited by Scavengers, the violent descendants of prisoners and convicts who were released by the Shroud during the war. Human civilization is now controlled by a government known as the Alliance. According to the game manual, the Alliance mostly lives in off-world colonies on other planets, but this is never shown or mentioned in the game.