Penko Park is among the best Pokémon Snap-likes available, a delightful, polished, and spooky riff on a neglected but beloved genre. So why has nobody heard of it? Bad timing. The adorably creepy photography game launched in October 2020, buried beneath the twin shitpiles of the pandemic and the previous election cycle. Four years later, we can perform a spooky season miracle and revive Penko Park from the dead.
Developed and published by Ghostbutter and available on Steam and Switch, Penko Park streamlines the original Pokémon Snap formula. Like the N64 classic, the game tosses you into a tram — this one driven by a cute little goblin. As the shuttle sputters through a mysterious forest, it’s your job to look in every direction, snapping pictures of curious critters hidden amongst peculiar plumage. Once you run out of film or reach the end of the track, you paste the best snapshots into your photo album, each addition rewarding XP that unlocks tools to make future expeditions more thrilling and productive.
Snap photos. Organize photos. Upgrade. Repeat. It’s a lovely little loop.
On-rail photography games have struggled to find purchase as a genre because of the inherent repetition; the Pokémon Snap games set the player on the same track repeatedly, each trip with diminishing returns. Penko Park’s creators, by comparison, are generous with the aforementioned unlocks. And so, nearly every trip into the wilds produces a new feature to test in the following run, like a mechanical accordion arm that grabs items far from the tram, a pink ball of dust that evokes strong reactions from the local fauna, and a turn signal that lets you divert the tram down alternate paths.
After a few runs, I’d have seen everything a course had to offer, and on cue, a new course would become available. I’d repeat the loop a few times, get a new course, loop, course, and before I knew it, I’d reached the end of my vacation in this creepy crawlies county.
Brevity may have been the secret to this genre all along, which makes a certain sense: on-rail photography games have a lot in common with arcade light gun games of the past, a genre that thrived in the short-burst pleasures of the arcade era and disappeared as players shifted to the longer, meaty, more interactive experiences of first-person shooters on PC and consoles at home. That you can enjoy the entirety of Penko Park in a weekend makes for an ideal seasonal experience, the sort of game that — like the pumpkin spice latte — can be savored every Halloween, then put back into storage for next year, where (with time and distance) its novelty can be relished all over again.
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