For something that generally separates itself from the post-PT horror crowd with its inspired amusement park exploration, its a shame that this inevitably falls to those depths with the third act. Although I will say this apes the formula somewhat better than others thanks to its mercifully short runtime even if it completely fumbles the thematic resonance that made PT work, exploiting mental illness and its "warping" effects on the mind for shock value rather than generating empathy. It is rather tasteless entertainment but for the five dollars I spent out of morbid curiosity I can't complain too much. It never bored and though the atrocious lead vocal performance grated me to no end, none of it overtly offended my paper thin standards for modern psychological horror.

I'm not sure what my favorite part was:

1) Having the autosave crash the game at one point

2) Riding the Ferris Wheel a second time and having an out-of-body experience as I got to float around in the sky while overlooking the Ferris Wheel (in the same circular motion as said ride)

3) Riding the Roller Coaster ride, getting off, getting the flashlight, then having the game softlock me into a state of not being able to exit the ride until I closed and reopened the game and continued

4) Deciding to skip a number of rides you were expected to take, opening up some paths by interacting with stuff near those points, then going back to the previous rides, then coming back to those paths to find them closed off and discovering that even reloading would not reopen the path you needed to progress the game

5) The amazingly bad PT loop at the end of the game.

My wife when the game was over: "This is it? This is really it? This was not worth staying awake for, at all."

I can't even say I mastered the game because I checked and two of the trophies were locked off past the Roller Coaster section, so I would have had to play all the way back through to that point from the beginning if I wanted to 100% it that badly. AND I DO NOT.

Clocking it at only 2 hours at the max and requiring little player input, The Park is really more of a personal vignette than a full fledged game. Playing it a second time tempered my frustration with it, though not enough to make it worth a play still. It has an awesome setting and a juicy if perhaps overplayed mental health theme. But The Park is like an unfinished cake you took out of the oven too early. You can smell the potential, it just doesn’t have enough to really hook the player before the credits are rolling, P.T. sequence included. And speaking of cake, the game also feels like it wants to have its cake and eat it too with how it wants to be an allegory AND a supernatural story. For such a simple story they really should have tempered their ambitions to make it at all satisfying. Everyone’s too afraid to give a conclusive ending these days even when no further plans exist. Anyway, after all this talk about cake I’m fiending for it like a man lost in the desert, so I’m gonna go find a helpless confection to ravage.

Could've been way better, mainly by having some sort of emotional or environmental contrast. Just putting the joyful atmosphere of an amusement park against the horror elements isn't new or innovative or interesting, and constantly sitting in the same emotional state is getting old really fast, just like in most horror games. As an example, Stephen King's Joyland inverts the trope by making almost 90% of the story very fluffy and kitschy, and only turns it around at the very end - that's a contrast that works.

The only okay part is the last scene with the typical horror metaphorical transformation of space which kinda works but again is a trope. I think this is something that a lot of games need to look at, really. Unexplained transitions from reality to fantasy disguised as a 'psychological component' that never give you any more info than 'hey this scares the protagonist (you) so everything is scary'. Even Senua's Sacrifice, whose setting is predestined to have this blurry line, rises above this, so why couldn't The Park do it?

4~5 years after purchasing this and feeling it stare at me guiltily from my library... Damn solid game actually! A bit by the numbers, but it actually remembers to MAKE something of its plot, characters and themes (oh hi there Paratopic didn't mean to DUNK on you from over there) so that's very much in its favor..

So you're a lady (I forgot her name already) who has seemingly been separated from her son (...I forgot his name too?!) in a recently closed Amusement Park. What a dunce am I right?? Well things get creepier from there as things go from unfortunate to REAL bad REAL quick as the young mother makes her way on the rides of this place to try and figure out what the heck happened to them both... It's a pretty neat premise actually - you are chasing your child, so obviously any ridiculously scary thing in your way that any regular human being would take one look at and say "Well fuck that I'm out!", she is going to keep going. And in the early game you do actually see your son hop on each ride, which is why you end up going on them all - a slow water ride turned into a ghost story telling, a mini-car spin ride stalked by a giant scarecrow monster, bumper cars, etc... And that is essentially "The game" - you go to a part of the park, read some lore drops on notes, find the ride, get the SPOOKS and then move onto the next spot. The game is only 1.5~2 hours so it very much does not overstay its welcome and reaches its "point" pretty quick and I do think it is a quite good premise. Is it basically just ripping off Silent Hill 2 but about a lady and her kid vs. a man and his wife? Yes, but now I can actually appreciate the... homage?

As we're moving through this spooksville town we get lots of lore about how the place may have been INTENTIONALLY built on an Evil parcel of land to do... bad things... and that lots of bad stuff happened here, including the death of the father/husband of our main protagonists. Neat! We also learn that maybe our PC isn't the best of moms, which leads to a reaaaaaaallly good ending that leads into some proper adult horror shit - what if you have kids... and end up deeply hating and resenting them? What then?

So yeah, the game is a literal and figurative spooky theme park for you to walk through and get a neat story told to you and some right proper spooks with a genuinely twisted yet quite open ending. I dig it!