The Park review

[Administrator]

The rise of the narrative adventure presents fresh challenges for both developers and reviewers alike. The reliable old mechanical barometers of quality become less important when your only interaction with the game world is to walk through and occasionally pick things up - features that are now pre-baked into every middleware game engine, and thus nearly impossible to get wrong.
In the post Dear Esther adventure genre, the emphasis is therefore skewed heavily towards the writing of the characters, the ability to tell a coherent story through fragmented scraps and the overall visual design of the world. The Park, a stroll through a sinister theme park from The Secret World developer Funcom, is only ever partially successful.
You play as Lorraine, a young widowed mother who has brought her son, Callum, to Atlantic Island Park, the New England attraction that she used to visit as a child. The park is closed when the game begins, but Callum has lost his teddy bear and while you have a conversation with the guy in the ticket office, Callum runs back into the park to find his toy. You, of course, must now follow him and that's when the weird s*** starts to go down.
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