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Alright, so next on my review list was going to be the two Maximo games, but after playing this...I feel like it needs to be talked about.  This is one of those games that I saw the title logo and read the description of "Set in a creepy amusement park hiding a dark and sinister secret, The Park is a first-person psychological horror experience focused on exploration and storytelling." And thought "Alright, interesting...so maybe like old Silent Hill where it focused both on the creepy horror aspects as well as telling some great story about the place...but also more like Outlast where it's more about running/hiding and making it through to the end?"

Well, not exactly.  Think more along the lines of Whatever Happened to Edith Finch, or more precisely The Vanishing of Ethan Carter as far as story telling and overall gameplay, but with less going on in that same gameplay area.  In other words, the Park is basically a walking simulator with dark elements.

But reviews I noticed seem to really talk it up, calling it an "unnerving" experience, and overall reception has been pretty alright.  After playing it, my first thought was "Am I missing something? Did I play a different game or something?" Because at best, I felt like the game was mediocre.  Had some "okay" things, but overall I felt like it severely lacked for that short 2-hour-at-most time I spent with it.

What was okay? What was missing? Well let's find out!

Story
So the game is about a woman who is just about to leave the park with her son, before he tells her that he accidentally left his teddy bear inside.  She starts to go back before having a mild episode, showing the player that she's going to be one of those MCs that deals with some stuff psychologically.  During which time, her son apparently runs back into the park, and you have to go back in and get him.  But little do you know that stepping back into the park is going to bring out some dark secrets and bring up the past.

Now, at a glance, this story sounds like it has potential for a short but great horror experience.  Your character has some psychological issues going on, and for a horror game that works great. Games like Eternal Darkness, Silent Hill Shattered Memories, and Until Dawn have really tried playing on this in the reverse way (learning and preying on your own fears), while most memorably Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, though not a horror game, had a great focus on an MC with her own psychological issues that were so prevalent and well handled in the game that it could make you feel like you shared the experience with her (especially if you wore headphones and experienced the voices going from each side, god was that such a great detail even if it was a little unsettling).

So at first, this premise along with the idea that the park has this "dark secret" and horror vibe going for it is great, consider me interested in seeing how it develops.

Weeell....I'll give this game credit that it has a lot of story going for it for a 1-2 hour experience.  But that's because this game is such an exposition dump that it almost makes Edith Finch blush.  Between exposition on some of the rides you go on, random exposition when you're walking (which also forces walking, so any time the character talks, running isn't possible), and the random notes and whatnot you'll find, there's just a lot being thrown at you in that 1-2 hours.

I'll also say this game and description kinda lie to you, or at least they keep it vague enough to make you think it's a horror game about the park itself.  In reality, it's more about the main character in sort of a "twisted" version of the park (which I'll explain later why I put that in quotes) she visited with her kid, dealing with her own stuff.  The "dark secrets" are all her own past about her mental illness, the death of her husband when she was pregnant (or not, her exposition kinda confused me at parts because I swear in one area she talked about her husband teaching their kid stuff, but admittedly some of the exposition went in one ear and out the other), and how she both despised her kid and loved him, and how she would have been perfectly okay with him getting lost.  Hell, it's pretty implied she beat her kid and would forget about it, since at a couple of points she talks about how he always had bruises that she didn't know where they came from, but that he'd get either bitey or recoil in some way when she wanted to look at it.

The ending is especially a mix of confusing and something that made me wonder along with some of the other exposition "Were we supposed to be rooting for this character?"  In the end, the "Boogeyman" (who is only credited with the name during the credits, it's never actually mentioned who he is otherwise) guides the MC's hands to grab a bloody icepick and lift it up, and then disappears.  The MC then freely thrusts the icepick into her kid's heart, as the game cuts to a police station interrogation room where we're shown that the moment with the out-of-moment dialogue with the guy in the ticket booth was actually the detective reassuring the MC, and that her son did go missing but she instead went to the police.  However, despite some parts of the game being obviously fictional, apparently the studio's MMO known as Secret World, and especially a tie-in thing they did for Halloween that continued the story of this game actually confirmed that several things in the game did actually happen, even if some were left up to question.

Overall, a lot of story and some of it interesting, but most of it was pretty ehhhhh.

Gameplay
Hey, remember that "Press button to Jason" thing in Heavy Rain that became kind of a joke in some youtube review videos? Well, I'd like to introduce you to "Press button to Callum" in this one.  Unlike Heavy Rain though, which confined it purely to the mall part of the prologue, you can call out to Callum throughout the entire game, and may/may not get a response back from him telling you in various ways to follow him...even though you rarely see him past the beginning, and it's never specified where his voice is coming from.

That's really the most the game gets from not being the "typical" walking simulator.  Most of the game, you're walking around from place to place, and for some reason are choosing to ride the rides that you see instead of finding your son.

I think the very first ride you take is a great foreshadowing of how the game itself is going to be, and I actually have to wonder if it was intentional to have it be that way for that exact reason.

So when you enter the park and follow where your son is running from a distance (and before you ask: no you never reunite with him, he's either always at a distance or just not there until the very end when you stab his little heart) you eventually encounter the first ride: swan boats.  Naturally since you see your son riding away on one despite it being on a track, you hop on the next boat to follow him.

This is where I feel like the game trolls you a bit and as I said, foreshadows (either intentionally or unintentional) just the type of experience you should expect.  So as you're riding on this swan boat, the only thing you can do is look and wait until the ride stops.  As you're moving, you enter this large cave area where you're subjected to a story of Hansel and Gretel for what feels like 5-10 minutes.  As you're forced to listen to the entire story, a couple of times there'll be movement or shaking under your boat.  If you're someone who is used to horror, this usually leads to something happening...maybe something rocks the boat and knocks you into the water, maybe some dark creature or whatnot pops up and delivers a jump scare, or does something that hurls you out of the cave or something...surely something will happen and you won't just be sitting for the entire Hansel and Gretel story with no horror payoff, right?

Actually, that's exactly what happens.  There's some shaking here or there every so often to build it up, but there's absolutely no payoff.  You're sitting there listening to the entire story, and once it's done and you're finally out of the cave, the swan boat turns its head a bit to look at you, and you get back to the dock and continue.

That's...basically the entire game.  You ride a ride either by choice or because the game tells you to, expect horror but get massive exposition dumps (the only "horror" bits that happened on a ride was the Octo-whirl with a really weak giant-version-of-the-boogeyman bit, and the roller coaster when you see his hands grab the bar of it alongside yours during more talking bits) to add to the story. 

Naturally, the haunted house had some bits, but they were all incredibly tame.  There was even a nod to PT with the room that you go through like 7 times repeatedly with an element changing each time.  But hell, even that was weak since unlike PT where you're both doing something each time and avoiding looking the wrong way to get killed, you're literally just running to the end of the room each time and being like "huh, okay so that changed I guess." When the changes become more blatant.  I think there was only one time where a door closed on the way through and you had to detour to a different door that suddenly opened.  But even then, all that led to was waiting in a dark room for a moment, the door reopened, you continued your walk through as one of the other doors banged open and closed, and you went through the door to continue the cycle again.  If anything, this felt like it was kind of trolling PT as well with how PT did something similar both with the sudden door slam and making you visit the bathroom in one of the trips (but this instead leading you to literally nothing), and with the random slamming of the other door (this being a thing also for the bathroom before the trip when you had to walk into it).

And as you'd expect, there's no enemy or antagonist in this.  I've mentioned the Boogeyman, but he's more like the character in Darksiders that pops up for story reasons.  He doesn't follow you around (though when you ride the rides, he's the one in the operator booth running it), and there's no threat in this game whatsoever.  That creepy squirrel mascot touted on the cover pops up I wanna say...maybe 2-3 times.  Twice as a "oh look, where did he come from? Oh he disappeared" element, and once at the end before it shifts to the Boogeyman...but as I said, no threat, no worry of having to start over or anything like that.  It's a completely-at-your-pace game.

What's particularly confusing to me is how much it marked itself as a horror, even giving a statement at the beginning saying that it'll mess with the audio, visuals, and overall sanity.  Reading that, it gave me legit Eternal Darkness vibes, thinking "Okay awesome, so it's a horror game where it'll fuck with my sound and make me think something is legit wrong with my system" But no, nothing like that.  At best, there's semi-shaking visuals/sound when she has an episode after seeing/hearing something, and there's maybe one scene after she takes some pills that exemplifies it a bit.  But nothing that warranted such a warning that it was going to mess with its players, especially telling them that this was a game best played with headphones in a dark room.  At most, all this game needed was a seizure warning since it has quite a few flashy light moments.

I was even okay with the idea of it being metaphorical/symbolic of her own mental state.  Hell, Among the Sleep is a great example of a horror game doing a metaphorical style correctly.  You're a baby in that game, and every horror element you face including the monsters are both warped versions of your own reality (so, seeing locations from a skewed baby perspective where everything is bigger and looks much different), and nightmares/coping mechanisms that a baby may absolutely have to explain things that happen to them (such as the main monster representing their mom when she gets upset and drunk).  At most you're still walking/crawling around, but the game really gets its message across very well while making sure the horror aspect isn't lacking.

I'll also say that it bugs me when games assume you can read the notes in their regular "written" form.  This game had a lot of notes with either really small text, or lighter-grey against white paper text that I wished had that "Clear text" option like Outlast that shows it as regular white text against a semi-transparent black background.  I felt like I missed a lot of small story bits because I didn't want to have to squint to read every note.

Graphics

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Man, for a game made in 2017, I'm actually semi disappointed.  Like, location looks wise, things looked fine.  Well not fine in some of the most important aspects, but the quality of those locations was fine enough for a 2017 game.

You can tell that they were intending this to be a game where character viewing was minimal (even though it wasn't with the MC), so the characters themselves looked a little shoddy for such a recent game, including the MC.  They looked like something from a game in like, I want to say 2005-2007, not something for only 4 years ago at most.

The park itself was also disappointing, but maybe because the game itself really set my expectations pretty high and just disappointed on multiple levels.  For a game that was pushing itself as a psychological horror, the main setting was just not that.  The park itself was supposed to be "decrepit" and look like it was in awful shape, but in all honesty, I saw a clean looking park with some debris and some occasional lighting issues.  Really, the most "horror" looking part was a crashed van that you pass by that may/may not have had blood on the outside, and a stabbed teddy bear in the driver seat, and even then it didn't seem entirely clear if it was blood since (at least to me) it looked pretty black as opposed to red.

I was actually expecting the park would pull a Silent Hill and just gradually become more and more twisted or something of the like as you made it further in, especially as the Boogeyman would appear and suggest that the park was some evil entity that wanted her son.  But like with the rest of the game, it just kinda tricked you and remained the same.

Like yeah, I get it, 1-2 hour game at most, but goodness there's still a lot that could be done even looks wise to make it a much more memorable 2 hour at most experience.

Music
Nothing memorable that I even recall, moving on.

Sounds/Voices
Nothing memorable sound wise, moving on.

Nothing memorable voice wise.  The boy sounded uninterested, the MC ranged from "I'm just getting a paycheck" to expressing some emotion, but for a character that was supposed to I guess be mentally conflicted, I wasn't really feeling it.  She had her definite annoyed moments (one too many actually) about hating her son for something, but everything else was horribly bland.

Replayability
It's a 1-2 hour "experience," not really made for multiple playthroughs, moving on.

Overall
If you can find it somewhere for free (which I'm sorry, but a 1-2 hour walking simulator game should be free or 5 bucks at most), give it a try just to, I guess, see where this review is coming from.  But I don't recommend buying it in any form.  It's not a phenomenal story-telling game like Edith Finch of Vanishing of Ethan Carter are for walking simulators, it's a somewhat shaky psych-study game compared to something like Hellblade, and it's just overall a pretty forgettable title that isn't worth the $12.99 that they're asking for it.

These sort of walking simulator games have always been controversial ever since Gone Home made them more popular. Gone Home works mostly because it includes a lot of 90s nostalgia...this sounds a lot like what Gone Home probably would've been like without the nostalgia. Or in this case, without the horror.

I think that's pretty much it though.  Despite also being short games, ones like Gone Home, Tacoma, Edith Finch (which was 30 minutes longer than this on a regular playthrough), and Ethan Carter all knew what they wanted to be, and pretty much ran with it.  They had their material, and the writers and artists knew how to make it work well enough (in cases like Tacoma), pretty well in their own way (in cases like Gone Home), and well enough with some gameplay mixes to make them stand out even more (in the case of Ethan Carter and Edith Finch).

The Park had a lot going on to where it felt like it had some identity issues.  In one aspect, it wanted to be a character-study into things such as depression to the point of attempted suicide and other mental illnesses with how much it hammered that aspect in with the MC.  In another aspect, it's clear some of the staff were originally wanting it to be a horror game with a dark and ambiguous ending based on both the choice of cover art, the ambiguous way the description of the game made it sound, as well as some of the story bits that make absolutely no sense and have no payoff, such as this whole spiel:

According to notes found throughout the area, the park's grounds are hinted to have a sinister history that tainted them, as a consequence of previous owner Archibald Henderson's actions, which the new owner Mr. Winter tried to take advantage of: several notes indicate that he had found a way to unlock the power hidden beneath the grounds by harvesting the positive emotions of guests, and believed that the energy he unlocked would be enough to grant him immortality. However, workers and employees alike experienced feelings of anxiety as a result of the process, and a number of fatal incidents occurred. One noticeable case involved 'Chad the Chipmunk', the park's mascot: Steve, the employee wearing the chipmunk suit, became disturbed and reluctant to remove the suit as time went on - and ultimately murdered a teenager with an icepick. Following Steve's arrest and the disappearance of over a dozen children inside the House of Horrors, the Park was forced to close permanently, drawing Lorraine's perceptions during the introduction into question.

At last, Lorraine enters the witch-faced House of Horrors, still following Callum, and remarking on the similarity between this and the Hansel and Gretel story. Inside, messages from Mr. Winter reveal that he retreated into the House with his machines when the Park closed, hoping to achieve immortality by other means. However, the interior of the House changes to a loop of Lorraine and Callum's own home through time, where it is revealed that Lorraine's father abused and abducted her as a child, her estranged mother refuses to help her in the belief that she ran away from home, and she suffered from depression when Callum was born and given electroshock therapy. As Lorraine passes through each version of her house, it becomes more decrepit and disturbing. At the end, she finds a message by Mr. Winter revealing that he needs children for his harvesting machines, and has already kidnapped and killed at least one in order to fuel his immortality; notes such as these, combined with popular depictions of Winter in a similar ringmaster's garb and top hat, suggest that he is actually the Boogeyman haunting the grounds

Like...what?  This was a story of a woman trying to find her son and going through a "decrepit" park to find him.  Where on Earth did that fantasy premise of a park owner seeking immortality come from, and why did they go that fantastical just to say "The park might have not been open when she took her son there, so her mind might be making this up"?  Like, minds can make up stuff, but good lord...not to mention, what a setup for a theme-park-based actual horror that could have been.

And on top of that, as said in the quote, all of this is found in notes...none of these story elements ever actually bear fruit in the actual game.  When you see the Boogeyman on the Octo-Whirl ride, he doesn't say anything.  When you see him on the Rollercoaster, he simply just says that he has plans with the park, and that the park itself hates her and her son.

So I get the feeling that those involved couldn't entirely agree on what they wanted...and it kinda shows.