The Park

Quotation forthcoming.

Quotation forthcoming.

The Park doesn’t really bring anything new to the horror table, but honestly, that’s okay. Its 90 minutes are filled with an impressive atmosphere, interesting themes, and spooky places to poke around. While some of the attractions are a bit long in the tooth, The Park provides enough tension and scares to warrant a playthrough from any horror fan.

A well designed, compact story that delivers an immersive and absorbing experience. The game only took me around an hour and a half to complete, but I’m sure that I missed a few things along the way.

Exploring the destructive psychosis of a plaintive individual is a noble, if not precarious, responsibility. The Park, however, can't decide if its manic behavior is either a means of identifying with its troubled protagonist or a symptom of its own decent into chaos.

The Park is atmospherically tense and suspenseful, but the trip into the depth of the human mind stays very superficial in terms of actual gameplay.

Falls well short of the bar set by Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, but this mini-mystery is drowning in atmosphere. The final 20 minutes are great. [July 2016, p.95]

There will come a day where The Park is available on PS4 for peanuts, and that day is when I’d fully recommend trying its fresh, but flawed, brand of horror out. Until then, the price of admission is too high for the brevity of the ride. Especially for one that has more than a few nuts and bolts missing from it.

The Park is a bit of an oddity. A walking simulator with an incredibly brief runtime – 90 minutes at a leisurely pace – that nonetheless has some fun ideas sprinkled in.

Although it was originally released for PC in the fall of 2015, The Park feels like a quick tech demo for virtual reality headsets more than a full release, and even if the content were presented in VR, everything about it is so bland that it wouldn't be effective anyway.

Ultimately this is a bland experience with a runtime less than some actually scary horror films. At $15.99, there just is no way I can recommend this. It almost feels like it is more suited to a VR demo, than an actual game. Save your money and rent a good horror movie, those at least come with a few scares.

Walking around a fun fair for an hour with a shouty, sweary woman who is only interested in herself is about as much fun as it sounds. I suggest you save your money for a ticket to a real fun fair and hope you get stuck on a rollercoaster for an hour. That would be much more thrilling than The Park.