A few hours ago the proper gameplay trailer dropped for South Park: Snow Day! – and we can clearly see that the crew at South Park Digital Studios have taken the foul-mouthed school kids back into the third dimension.
Both South Park: The Stick of Truth and South Park: The Fractured but Whole sported a 2D aesthetic that was slavishly accurate to the TV show, but Snow Day! is doing it’s best to give the South Park crew a little depth. The characters are all now lumpy, bloated simulacrums of their 2D selves – in a style that seems very reminiscent of the original Nintendo 64 title. Kind of communicates that the path to 3D for the South Park crew is always the same outcome, a bit like evolution turning everything into crabs eventually.
Does it work? Somewhat. It’s more a bummer to say farewell to the hard work that went into making the previous entries so iconic and recognisable. South Park is one of those shows that is animated poorly, but in amazing way – or animated amazingly, in a poor way; depending on how you look at it. Either way, it’s pleasing. So seeing the latest game lean away from the simple 2D vehicle of delivery kind of saps some of it’s crude, puerile charm.
That’s before you even start to talk about the actual design at play, which will see the game lean into being a real-time, multiplayer action game – some key terms that are fraught with peril.
It’s worth keeping an eye on either way, to see how it develops. Maybe it will be a low key banger. With fart jokes.
Are you keen for a new South Park game? How do you feel about the series returning to 3D? Let us know in the comments or on social media.
Known throughout the interwebs simply as M0D3Rn, Ash is bad at video games. An old guard gamer who suffers from being generally opinionated, it comes as no surprise that he is both brutally loyal and yet, fiercely whimsical about all things electronic. On occasion will make a youtube video that actually gets views. Follow him on YouTube @Bad at Video Games
