The Park showcases what a walking sim can be. If you boil it down you really don’t do much but it is a great experience. You wander through the park and as you get to certain places and ride certain rides while looking for your son more of the backstory to Lorraine as well as the park is revealed. So while you don’t get much actual gameplay you get one of the finest stories I have seen in games as well as a fantastic atmosphere that allows the game to be very creepy while not having more than a couple actual jump scares. The Park uses lights; shadows; music; as well as the mind of an unstable character to manifest a feeling of dread and uncertainty. The voice acting was top notch as well. The graphics were above average as a whole. The water detail was awesome and the foliage detail was good. The fire; lighting; and object detail was decent but not as impressive as the others mentioned. The mechanic where you can call out for your son was a neat one as it not only can be used to show Lorraine’s state but it will also highlight where to go if you’re stuck. That being said the game was very straightforward about where to go.
I played The Park on Linux using Wine. The game did crash on me once when entering the fun house but it was a random crash as the very next time I entered it worked just fine. I noticed no other bugs or glitches. The game auto saved at checkpoints and for the most part they were frequent enough to not be a problem but one point later in the game in the fun-house they were stretched very far apart. Overall a manual save system would have been nice. The game had three AA settings; a v-sync toggle; an FOV slider that went from 80-100 and two other graphics options. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game’s performance was pretty good overall. There were a few moments where the frame rate could dip into the 40’s or 50’s but those were mostly cut scenes and when actually playing the game the frame rate was usually above 60. The game is very heavy on the GPU so that will be the big factor for your performance. If you have a multi monitor setup you may notice that certain things on screen may not display properly and if so you can add
“[/Script/Engine.LocalPlayer]
AspectRatioAxisConstraint=AspectRatio_MaintainYFOV”
to the Engine.ini file to fix this. Also you should be aware that the FOV in The Park is vertical not horizontal so that will mean what you want to set will be different from some other games. Usually I prefer an FOV of 100 but with horizontal I found 80 to be better.
Game Engine: Unreal 4
Graphics API: DXVK
Disk Space Used: 2.8 GB
Input Used: keyboard and mouse
Graphics Settings Used: 6x AA; motion blur off; Ultra detail; v-sync on; 80 FOV
GPU Usage: 70-100 %
VRAM Usage: 1908-3265 MB
CPU Usage: 11-25 %
RAM Usage: 2.5-3.6 GB
Frame Rate: 46-144 FPS
Overall I can’t recommend The Park enough. It is one of the best walking sims I have played and has a fantastic story and production values. I finished it in 98 minutes and enjoyed every second of it. It is easily worth it’s current price tag of $16.59 and I would gladly pay $49.99 for it.
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.3.7 | Manjaro Mate | Kernel 5.16.14-1-MANJARO | Wine 7.4 | DXVK v1.10L