Lorraine is a manifestation of agitation, instability, and distress. Part of this comes from her decision to take her young son Callum to an amusement park (as a non-parent I consider this prospect terrifying) and the rest of it stems from losing track of her son at that same amusement park (also terrifying). Worse, the park appears to be under the control of metaphorical and/or actual demons that delight in tormenting and teasing a range of emotions out of Lorraine’s aching soul. Beneath the blanket of night and under total isolation, Lorraine must find her lost son.
The Park subscribes to an emerging genre of exploration-focused games. Forged by Dear Esther, epitomized by Gone Home, and explored more recently by Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and Firewatch, these games embrace a traditional first-person point of view, but prefer narrative and atmosphere over traditional gameplay mechanics. The Park isn’t one to break form, offering a marginal amount of interactivity inside its boundaries. Lorraine can call out to Callum, and he (always in the distance) responds to lead her along. This not only directs the player around the intended path, but also clues them in toward optional bits of story and context.
In scouring Atlantic Island Park’s pragmatic grounds, Lorraine will find notes by disenfranchised employees, vague conspiracy diatribes by the park’s owner, and requisite paranormal minutia regarding the land the park was built upon. Collectively, The Park doesn’t appear to be interested in tying this into Lorraine’s emerging psychosis. This may stem from The Park’s origins as a blood relative to Funcom’s MMO, The Secret World, but I suspect that The Park dangles so many threads because it is interested in being creepy for the sake of being creepy. This is fun, but it underscores the horror and general impact of the final act. I wanted it all to be there for a reason.
That reason ties into Lorraine’s missing son. Her journey throughout the park is overflowing with monologues regarding Callum, her role in society as a mother, mourning over Callum’s deceased father, and personal thoughts and feelings regarding her own damaged childhood. Most of this is really heavy stuff! Especially the kinds of personal revelations that may stem from the designers’ experiences inside their own lives. Honestly, this would have been enough for The Park to deliver its message, which is why it’s so weird when the first two acts are consumed by Weird Shit At The Park conspiracies.
While the necessity of the first two acts is questionable, one can’t deny the authenticity of their expression. The Park appears to take place in the early 80’s, and Atlantic Island Park is an impressive rendition of dilapidated Americana. It’s not just that most of the rides look unsafe and/or broken down, but they all have a tangible sense of failure and abandonment. The Ferris wheel is huge and creepy. The swan boat ride, complete with its own projected retelling of Hansel and Gretel, has pitch-perfect boat-banging-against-side-of-rail sound effects. I could practically smell the electricity humming off the bumper car arena. That sense of failure and abandonment is intrinsically woven into Lorraine’s persona, providing the literal park ground with more character than its gauche backstory.
Everything comes together in The Park’s third act. While it’s undoubtedly Funcom riffing on the infamous P.T.—you pass through a loop of the same rooms and hallways over and over under ostensibly different circumstances—it’s still effective in the information it tries to relate. This section takes a bunch of plot threads dangling in the wind, grabs hold of the most important one, and ties it off into a satisfying conclusion. The macabre nature of its implications, unfortunately, feels like an unnecessary indulgence, Lorraine’s issues aren’t haunting because of their violence, but it doesn’t cause much harm to the effectiveness of the message. In accurately conveying a Lorraine’s instability and sorrow, The Park’s final act is a tremendous success.
The Park’s transition to consoles, following its late 2015 release on PC, isn’t without its drawbacks. The game is explicitly interested in showing the player a lot of hand-written text from a few different authors, along with pieces of typed letters and newspaper clippings. I couldn’t see any of it five feet away from a 50” television. Other games have solved this problem by preserving the authenticity of the artifact but also augmenting it with a clearly-displayed rendition of the same text with the press of a button. Games have been doing this for a while and I couldn’t understand why The Park can’t observe the necessary compromise in shifting between a computer monitor + desk chair to a television + couch. Hopefully this oversight can be corrected in a patch.
If story-driven games were a model kit, The Park would be assembled with a total compliance to the instructions. This guarantees the handiwork, but removes any personal touch of innovation. In terms of pure interaction—you walk, read letters, explore a space, and listen to a collection of dialogue—The Park has nothing new to offer.
Take that same model kit, give a story after its construction, and it’s suddenly more affecting. While it’s a bit incoherent, the driving sentiment of The Park’s overarching narrative is a powerful and skilled attempt at telling a complicated story. It’s hard to capture the nuance of the relationship between a mother and a child (and the world) in any medium, especially a videogame, but The Park finds a certain measure of success detailing the conflict between Lorraine and Callum. If these characters weren’t buoyed to this model, they may not exist at all, and that’s not a price I’m comfortable paying.
