Paradox of Perfection

Imagine living through all of human history. You'd see everything.

Travel through time as an immortal and solve each era's mysteries.

Era 01 / The Primitive Era · c. 10,000 to 4000 BCE

Before writing. Before cities had names.

Göbekli Tepe · Turkey

Giant carved pillars, put up before anyone here had farms. Nobody knows what they were for.

Teomancimit · CC BY-SA 3.0
Jericho · Jordan Valley

A stone tower about ten thousand years old. People still argue about why it's there.

Fullo88 at Italian Wikipedia · Public domain
Jiahu / Yellow River Valley · China

Signs scratched into tortoise shells, thousands of years before Chinese writing. Were they words?

Windmemories · CC BY-SA 4.0

Era 02 / The Ancient Era · c. 4000 to 500 BCE

The first kings. And the first people who wrote anything down.

Uruk · Iraq

One of the first real cities. They were writing here before almost anyone else.

tobeytravels · CC BY-SA 2.0
Mohenjo-Daro · Pakistan

A planned city with drains and public baths. Nobody has read its script yet.

Saqib Qayyum · CC BY-SA 3.0
Waset / Thebes · Egypt

Temples bigger than anything around them. Somebody here knows more than they say.

René Hourdry · CC BY-SA 4.0
Athens · Greece

Philosophers asking questions nobody could answer. One of them was executed for it.

Steve Swayne · CC BY 2.0

Era 03 / The Medieval Era · c. 500 to 1450 CE

Empires everywhere, and scholars trying to keep the books safe from them.

Baghdad · Iraq

Scholars translated the world's books here. Most of those books are gone now.

Mustafa Waad Saeed · CC BY-SA 4.0
Timbuktu · Mali

A desert city full of scholars. Families hid its manuscripts for generations.

upyernoz from Haverford, USA · CC BY 2.0
Kraków · Poland

A royal castle on a hill, with a dragon in the cave underneath. At least, that's the story.

Monika Towiańska · CC BY-SA 4.0
Kyoto · Japan

Japan's capital for about a thousand years. Lots of temples. Lots of quiet politics.

Kakidai · CC BY-SA 4.0
Novgorod · Russia

A trading city that voted on its leaders and wrote letters on birch bark.

User№101 · CC BY-SA 3.0

Era 04 / The Renaissance Era · c. 1450 to 1750 CE

Someone builds a printing press, and suddenly the map isn't big enough.

Mainz · Germany

Gutenberg printed here. After that, knowledge stopped being rare.

Luwima · CC BY-SA 4.0
Tenochtitlan · Mexico

A city built on a lake, bigger than most cities in Europe. A few years later, it was gone.

Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). · CC BY-SA 4.0
Florence · Italy

Painters and inventors, all chasing money from the same few bankers.

Gary Campbell-Hall · CC BY 2.0
Lisbon · Portugal

Ships left from here for the edge of every map.

Alvesgaspar · CC BY-SA 3.0
Ouro Preto · Brazil

A gold rush town up in the hills. The gold went to Portugal.

Raquel Mendes Silva · CC BY-SA 4.0
Cusco · Peru

The Inca capital. The Spanish built their city right on top of its walls.

tomscoffin · CC BY 2.0

Era 05 / The Industrial Era · c. 1750 to 1950 CE

Steam changes everything. Mostly the speed.

Manchester · United Kingdom

The first industrial city. The mills ran day and night.

Clem Rutter, Rochester, Kent. · CC BY-SA 3.0
Philadelphia · USA

Where the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Rdsmith4 · CC BY-SA 2.5
St. Petersburg · Russia

The tsars' Winter Palace. In 1917, it was stormed.

Godot13 · CC BY-SA 4.0
São Paulo · Brazil

Coffee money and railways turned a small town into a giant.

Marcos Elias de Oliveira Júnior · CC0
Tokyo / Edo · Japan

Edo became Tokyo, and Japan remade itself in one lifetime.

Kakidai · CC BY-SA 4.0
Paris · France

Napoleon ordered this arch for his armies. He died before it was finished.

ZeusUpsistos · CC BY-SA 4.0

Era 06 / The Modern and Future Era · Present to 2100 CE

Now, and whatever comes next.

Shenzhen · China

A fishing town in 1979. Now a city of millions.

Charlie fong · CC BY-SA 4.0
Mumbai · India

A bridge across the bay, and over twenty million people on the shore.

Streetsoda · CC0
San Francisco · USA

The Golden Gate. Just south of it, people are building tomorrow's machines.

Frank Schulenburg · CC BY-SA 4.0
Seoul · South Korea

One of the most connected cities on Earth.

USAGI_POST · CC0
Singapore · Singapore

A tiny island that turned into one of the richest places in the world.

This Photo was taken by Supanut Arunoprayote. Feel free to use any of my images, but please mention me as the author and · CC BY 4.0
Dubai · UAE

Desert to the world's tallest tower in a few decades. What comes after that?

imran shahabuddin · CC BY 2.0

01 /

About the game

Paradox of Perfection is a 2.5D RPG, and I'm making it solo. You play an immortal who moves through time one era at a time, and every place you land in has a mystery you have to figure out.

The first release is two places: Waset in ancient Egypt, and medieval Kraków.

Everything in it is made by people. No AI art, music or writing.

02 /

Trailer

No trailer yet. When there is one, it goes right here.

03 /

Support the game

I'm a solo dev making this in my spare time. Patreon is how I pay the artists who draw it.

Join on Patreon

04 /

Credits

The era photos all come from Wikimedia Commons. You'll find each one below with its author and licence. The photos are shown dithered, and those edited versions carry the same licence as the originals.