Did you take advantage of XBox’s winter sale on games? I did!
My gaming style is… well, kinda like the rest of my style: eclectic, leaning toward the dark, and easily distracted.
Glitter goth granny-core at its best!
So, you can probably already guess that I downloaded several games to try and that I’ll take my dear, sweet time getting around to them. I can’t neglect my crosswords, after all! 😉
I started with a first-person game from 2015 called The Park. It won points just for being a first-person horror game. I always prefer those. Bonus points for having sensible controls – although I did have to turn the sensitivity WAY down.
You start as a widowed mother, Lorraine, who enters Atlantic Island Park, chasing after her wayward son. No matter how many times you tell Callum to stop, to come back, he won’t listen. That doesn’t stop you from shouting at him as you go along, though. Mostly because hollering at the little brat is literally the only tool as your disposal.
And… thanks for that little reminder of why I am child-free. *shudder*
The Park is a psychological horror video game – with heavy emphasis on the video part. You wander around the park, hopping on rides and collecting clues as to what shut the now-abandoned park down. With as little opportunity as there is to actually do anything, you might as well be a viewer, rather than a player.
It isn’t an unpleasant experience, to be fair. The graphics are neat and developers did a good job creating atmosphere. There are even a few clever jumps along the way – though there’s an awful lot of waiting around to get to them.
Bearing in mind that I took my time exploring (and that I have the attention span of a gnat,) it took me about two hours to finish The Park. A more determined gamer could easily do it in about an hour, which makes me glad I waited to buy it on sale!
The biggest problem isn’t the lack of opportunities to go off-script in this narrative-driven game; it’s the fact that it only took a couple of minutes to work out what was happening and what the likely outcome would be. The rest of the time was spent confirming what I already knew. By the time I made it to the big reveal, it was a relief to have it over and that left me feeling… blegh.
There were glimmers of what The Park could have been in its creepy amusement park settings and sudden jump-scares, but the game got so bogged down in storytelling (and let down by lack of actual gameplay,) that it didn’t even muster a dim glow.
Rating: 🎮🎮🎮 (3/5)
Recommend? No.
Play Again? No.
