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?