“Welcome to Atlantic Island Park …”
Despite its internal problems, Funcom tries to move forward. And after camping through the dark fantasy environment with The Secret World , the studio takes refuge in a small narrative experiment that borrows several things from the aforementioned MMO in terms of atmosphere. In The Park, premiered in time for Halloween, we will play the young
Lorraine , a widowed mother, who decides to take her son Callum to the amusement park she attended as a child. When the park is already closing and we are in the parking lot with our son in the car, Callum realizes that he has lost his teddy bear. As a good mother we are, we talk to the ticket seller and, in a mistake, the child runs inside the amusement park.
This is the excuse to get into it . The employee promises to close the doors once we cross the lathe of the entrance. When we go up the escalators that take us to the amusement park, reality becomes a dark nightmare and things are no longer as they seem.
This is the starting point of The Park . We will call Callum and use his distant answers to take the correct address. But that is the illusion to hide that, in reality, what the game wants to offer is not enough.
You can not lose yourself, the theme park is a very linear giant circle and will always take us where the title wants and follow a certain order. This is not necessarily bad, but given the look that its gameplay is taking, it certainly would have needed a review and / or a reformulation by the study in terms of expanding its duration
His first – and most tedious attraction – is a ride on tracks on a swan that will tell us the story of Hansel & Gretel . Callum enters it and we behind him into the next boat. We will watch and listen to the story through static projections and a
slow narration in voice-over that, to seem of who writes these lines, is not the best way to catch the player. And so are all the attractions offered by the game.
The wheel, the roller coaster, the rotating planes will be no more than a fixed animation, where we can only move the camera 180º accompanied by the narration of our character. All this serves to realize the mental state in which Lorraine is and understand everything that happens around.
In the short time of life that has the game, an hour and a little more, does not give the feeling of sympathizing with the character and it seems that the story of Lorraine is simply as an excuse to enter attractions and splices with the occasional successful scare . The setting of the park is the most careful of the game, despite the fact that it is cold and not
very credible, it recreates a gloomy atmosphere that blows from the mythology of HP Lovecraft at full speed – attention to the wink of Cthulhu on Callum’s shirt . Do not expect puzzles or complex situations inside the park, they do not exist.
As we mentioned before, it is an adventure of linear narrative horror, but in which its playable simplification plays against and not in favor of the experience, since at least one puzzle here, a test there would have expanded the scant life that this title has .
It is only at the end of the game that he really invites his proposal to be interesting, since at times it transforms, saving the distances, into a kind of Silent Hills PT. Lantern in hand we will seek to end this experience of horror in the last cartridges of The Park.
We will face the emotional stability of Lorraine and her fears interpreted in situations that we will repeat again and again in a series of corridors, as happens in the canceled title of Kojima. We will have to pay attention to all the texts that we have found throughout the game,
because it will be the only way to understand the end that it offers us. The texts and dialogues will all be in English so maybe, more than one, do not understand the ” awkward ” outcome of the proposal.
