Penko Park

Genre: First-Person On-Rails Shooter / Misc.

Players: 1

.

Review:

Penko Park, released on PC in 2020 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022, is a game with an unorthodox approach to First-Person Shooters with the gameplay being On-Rails, and the “shooting” being the shooting of a camera, with your focus being on a variety of odd creatures surrounding your expeditions into one of various locations. While this is a distinct and fairly unique formula, Nintendo fans will find it to be a gameplay formula that is surprisingly familiar, and that is because this is pretty much the exact same gameplay formula that we see in the Pokemon Snap series of games, including the latest installment on Nintendo Switch, New Pokemon Snap.

While Penko Park is definitely inspired by Pokemon Snap, the presentation here is decidedly lower-budget, for better or worse. While this game takes place in 3D environments, the characters are all simple 2D characters, with many being little more than stick figures or mundane objects with a smiley face drawn on them, all with minimal animation. Having said that, this simple art style isn’t without a quaint sort of charm of its own, as if the world is built out of a child’s construction paper creations.

Like the visuals, the sound here is similarly simple, with very little music and most of the sound coming from environmental noises, or the indistinct high-pitched cutesy murmurings of its characters. Personally, I feel like this would work better with a more pronounced and distinctive soundtrack, but what’s here works well enough, I suppose.

When it comes to the gameplay, this game doesn’t really do anything original compared to Pokemon Snap, but it does a surprisingly good job copying Nintendo’s formula. Each location has multiple paths unlocked through the use of new abilities you gain as you progress, with those abilities also being useful for getting the Penko creatures to behave differently, giving you additional fodder for photos to fill your scrapbook, which can store your best photo for each creature in each of its poses or states. In addition, there are also items in the environment you can use a grabber tool to collect if you happen to spot them. As with Pokemon Snap, the good variety of critters to photograph and the puzzle element of how to evoke their different poses makes for a lot of fun variety here.

There are some negatives in this game, though. Many of the Penko creatures just look like ordinary objects in the environment, making it really easy to miss them. And unlike the Pokemon Snap games, you don’t really get much of a sense of these creatures interacting in a way that feels natural, like you’ve stumbled into a real living place rather than a theme park attraction.

Okay, so Penko Park isn’t in any danger of usurping the Pokemon Snap to take the crown for this unusual sort of On-Rails First-Person Shooter with a wildlife photography theme. However, as a smaller version of that same sort of experience, it fares really well. If you’ve already exhausted everything Pokemon Snap and New Pokemon Snap have to offer, Penko Park makes for a satisfying follow-up, albeit a smaller and much less ambitious one. And since it’s anyone’s guess when we’ll ever see another Pokemon Snap game, this might be the closest we’ll get in a while.

tl;dr – Penko Park is an On-Rails First-Person Shooter with a wildlife photography theme much in the same way that Pokemon Snap is, and that is because this game is pretty much an off-brand Pokemon Snap. Despite how this game was clearly directly inspired by Nintendo’s series, this is a pretty good replica of the formula, albeit a low-budget one with really simple visuals, a soundtrack that’s virtually absent, and missing a few of the nuances of the Pokemon Snap games. However, as a small-scale filler between those titles, Penko Park is an excellent choice.

Grade: B

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Eli Goodman, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Ilya Zverev, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}