The Park Review

In The Park, there’s a creepy-looking and murderous squirrel-mascot, and a gloomy and eerie amusement park, where kids go and run around kicking and screaming during the day, but that drastically changes at night. The mix of an environment designed for something innocent and pure like children with a macabre series of events has a very effective result. It is indeed a very promising feature for horror games, but it’s executed radically different to games like Five Nights at Freddy’s. The Park is not a game that uses jump-scares and tension as a goal, but rather as tools to build up the nitty-gritty of the game: a narrative-driven experience. Similar to what I mentioned in my review of SOMA, horror is a means to lead the audience into a particular train of thought.

What drives the narrative is not the superficial motivation of the main character, Lorraine, but what she discovers because of it. As the park closes, she realises that her son, Callum, left his teddy bear behind. That pushes her kid to imprudently run through the bars of the park’s main gate and defyingly go in to recover it. So Lorraine, understandably a bit pissed off at him, chases him like the good mother she is. And that’s when things start to get weird. The park is a wrecked and deserted mess. She points out that this wasn’t the state of the park when she was leaving, but brushes over that fact and ventures after her kid. After all, the safety of her kid is above everything.

From the beginning of the game, The Park presents itself as a slow-paced first person ‘walking simulator’, where the little interaction there is consists of picking up and reading notes. We can call out for our son, who will ask us to find him. Following his voice, we’ll have a thorough tour throughout the park, getting on every ride in order to progress. But other than that, there’s not much to do, to the point that the first ride is nothing other than a boat ride. Even when we spot the aforementioned squirrel glancing at us with those penetrating and soulless eyes, slowly and rhythmically inhaling and exhaling a couple of paces away from us, we can’t do anything. Lorraine doesn’t react to its presence and since at that point we’re buckled up on a ride, there’s nothing we can do to acknowledge it, other than eye back at it. But aside from the occasional awkwardness of seeing something odd happening in front of you and Lorraine not reacting to it, the game benefits a lot from its mechanics.

On the one hand, it is true that sometimes the game feels like a ride (how appropriate), and that we’re there to spectate what unfolds before us. The way the game foreshadows every event and funnels you into each one of them is not too subtle either. On the other hand, this slow pace – even for such a short game – makes Lorraine’s chase infuriating, but not always in a bad way. We begin genuinely troubled for Callum’s safety, but we start feeling as if he was taking the mick out of us, in a very creepy way. It whispers “Come find me, mummy”, but we know that he’s very far away from us. Lorraine’s soliloquy gradually changes, covering a range of emotions towards her son. The more scared – and impatient – the player becomes, the more resentful Lorraine’s self-reassuring monologues are. From the angst and worry expressed at the beginning, she’s gradually thrown into a vicious cycle of remorse and spite towards her family, friends and own son; and as the player, we feel this frustration through the lethargic mechanics.

Perhaps the reason why playing this game feels so demotivating at times is due to its unrealistic and purposelessly dull level design. Every attraction is miles away from each other, and there are so few in the park. They become episodes within the game, and travelling from one to the next is a space for Lorraine’s to give us an over-explanatory view of some aspect of her life. Even when done this way, I had to wait up until she was done talking, refraining myself from picking up a note, so Lorraine didn’t start talking about the note over her own monologue. That being said, the continental vistas that the mountainous North American location provides feel truly cathartic, particularly when on top of the Ferris-wheel or as we walk among the pine trees.

The parallelism between the player and Lorraine strengthens the connection between the two, despite never being fully achieved. We never feel as attached to the son, for example, as we don’t really interact with him. But the game cleverly uses the son’s lack of presence to focus on Lorraine’s own self-centred experience, without stressing too much on how their relationship is, but rather how Lorraine feels about it. The exclusion and alienation of the boy is utilised to shape the player’s emotions without direct influence by the boy. In other words, our empathic connection with Lorraine makes us feel like how Lorraine feels towards her son. Lorraine is a well-built character, and her inner discourse will allow us to get a glimpse of what it is like being a single mother in such a precarious situation, and the hardships that she has had to endure. However, towards the end, we start losing control of her and our input is not important anymore. When we start doing meaningful things, the game decides that is not our time to play anymore.

The crux of the game is not what we can see in the game. It is not what Lorraine repeats to herself, or not even the very ending. This game relies a lot on what it doesn’t say. There are plenty of details that hint at very radically distinctive approaches to the game, and what’s important in this game are all those lingering thoughts that the player will have. The game’s ending is meant to leave you confused and dazzled, doubting yourself and wondering about what you just witnessed. But it doesn’t do that in the same way as, let’s say, BioShock Infinite did, throwing very complex concepts at you and giving you a lazy explanation of what happened with more holes than a strainer.

The way The Park gets you is by giving you just enough information about the blanks in the story, and letting your mind subconsciously select which details are relevant, depending on what you find and pay attention to, and completing the story with them. This game doesn’t encourage exploration, but although notes are never hidden, it’s easy to miss some, or neglect a line of a letter because at the time it didn’t make much sense. This game will create a disparate experience for each player as the nature of the characters and notes can lead to very different interpretations. This, nevertheless, will at times render some characters or details superfluous in the story and without explanation of why or how they were there. That is, if you have no knowledge prior to playing the game.

The main issue that The Park has is that it is a very self-referential game. Funcom, the developers, have expanded upon concepts that are very alien to many people, as most characters and symbols are taken straight out of The Secret World (TSW), an MMORPG released by the same studio in 2012. This game dealt with themes relating to occult phenomena, the underworld, and above all the psyche. Although The Park works as a standalone piece, it’s filled with lore when situated in context with TSW. My experience lacked any background in TSW, so despite being a bit confused, I was able to conjure up some juicy explanation. After completing it, I did some digging about TSW’s universe and figured out much of the symbolism within The Park, which shut any theories I may have had about the events that took place in the game. Contradictorily, knowing more about this game makes it lose a great deal of its potential, but it sorts out some of the incoherencies it may have.

The Park is, above all, a psychological experience that allows for interpretation by the player that is not acquainted with TSW. Nevertheless, this glowing feature is thwarted by the fact that many references make no sense outside a very niche context. The way the occult is dealt with in TSW has a much lighter tone than in The Park, and even when put together, some elements don’t exactly congeal well. My advice is this: play this game with no prior knowledge, and after that, do some research upon its lore. This game may not be the most coherent of all in terms of story, but the technical quality and emotions that is sure to stir up in you is enough to give it a go.