The immersive sim is in a renaissance if you know where to look. Even if major studios have neglected the genre, Deus Ex and its peers have inspired ambitious passion projects. One such project is Parkside: Decayed Soul Manipulation.
Just from a glance, Parkside’s tone and atmosphere are unmistakable. The proximate crude realism of Cruelty Squad combined with the resurgence of low-poly tastes finds a loving home. It is like Deus Ex purposefully de-made, and the shabby feel of this techno hell is in direct conversation with the more imposing, competent depictions of our coming dystopia that floated around decades before.
The lore of Parkside is not what I would call subtle. One idea of late capitalism—one of its logical endpoints as the contradictions tighten around its neck—is that the marching orders for consumption begin to boil down into shouted slogans, desperate advertisements in an endless race to the bottom. In Parkside, it is manifest across physical public space instead of in an algorithm. “DO NOT ORGANIZE.” “I LOVE TAKEOUT FOOD.” “OUR HAND FEEDS YOU.” The game revels in taking the blunt message of the powers-that-be in game and shifting that force back onto it, aikido style.
Parkside, like many passion projects, sometimes embraces its inspirations a little too closely. Chinese takeout items are everywhere on the map because the fusion of Asian-Western cultures was a big cyberpunk marker in the 1980s-90s, when Japan’s rise was novel. It is no longer novel. The Japanese mafia, too, has almost mystical properties in the game’s deep lore. It is the rare time when I am taken out of the world.
Luckily, that world is largely well realized. The urban areas feel cramped, with lots of moving elements (trains, flying vehicles, drones, cars, etc.) that make it feel alive. You can take any car lying around for a spin. The density of the police surveillance state on top of this activity is palpable. There are plenty of uniformed men patrolling, drones in the air, military vehicles parked to cut off chokepoints, and even an ominous paramilitary gunship that looms above at random intervals in the game’s early cityscapes.
My favorite mission in the game, however, is in the godforsaken outskirts of the game’s key city. It has no central objective marker. What follows is more like something from STALKER or Fallout: a tense shoot-on-sight prowl through desolate countryside, wasted buildings, and crumbling structures. Parkside delivers impressive variety in its 12-hour runtime.
There are many ways to upgrade your cyberbody vessel POLYPHEMUS. The main abilities are impactful and have sub-abilities to emphasize your investment. I was focused on traversal and subterfuge but never touched a hacking node, and only later realized how effective turrets could be. Even with this slapdash strategy, I had plenty of points to invest. Not enough to get every single node, but pretty much all the ones I was interested in, plus a few I needed in clutch situations.
A later mission centered around an ominous cathedral provided perhaps the most difficult combat challenge and a good example of squeezing all I could from my abilities. There were no save spots that I could find, so health had to be managed tactically, with working knowledge of every pickup on the map necessary to survive. There were plenty of normal “human” style enemies but also these bullet sponge careening monstrosities, aptly called “abominations.” I experimented with extra armor, telekinesis, turrets, and upgraded camouflage until I hit upon the right combo.
To clamber up one of the mission’s walls means avoiding damage, or POLYPHEMUS’ limbs are likely to be crippled and their jumping stunted. It is a strange possible softlock that the game’s systems create. In a similar vein, any kind of combat can make friendly/enemy flags very inconsistent. I had to restart twice in one mission before the game would let me talk to the correct NPC after completing their objective because they had been toggled hostile in the course of doing their quest.
Parkside is fairly lenient on successful stealth, and thorough exploration rewards you with more ways to route around enemies. It is easy to reposition and wait out timers. The National Archives mission is one of the highlights, with enemies questioning your credentials while you skulk around trying to disable their security systems. Learn to love the vent and always seek the high ground.
As of this review, the most popular thread on the Steam forums for Parkside (by a country mile) is titled “yea, put in a save system.” The debate over saving speaks to an identity crisis. This is a game harkening back to the crunchy RPG elements of Deus Ex, but having to redo 30 minutes of immersive sim gameplay is nobody’s idea of fun. To justify this decision, Parkside needs the chops to match Cruelty Squad’s expressive movement and mission format. In that game, the lack of traditional in-mission saving is much more explicable.
Parkside is not shy of its own ambitions, and one thing I learned early on after some time-consuming failures was to take a Hitman-style approach to the game’s missions. It was the second mission where I almost contemplated dropping the game or lowering the difficulty, after failing a finicky combat section of a main quest after completing a time-consuming side quest several times. Instead, I decided to barrel through.
I had to alter my mindset and give the benefit of the doubt to the developer’s vision. I started using my first foray into a new level as an opportunity to scout important people, places, and things before finally tightening my approach in subsequent attempts. Missions often start you off in a small or crowded space, like an alley, guiding your eyes to climbable areas and letting you ease into the larger playspace of the mission. I took to searching for the bird’s-eye view of these mission areas and let the dopamine for experimentation and exploration wash over me. In this way, Parkside is a bizarre fusion of RPG and action-stealth mission structure that I have rarely seen.
For a bizarre game, it has a suitably offbeat setup. The Illuminated Brethren of Conclave Automata have placed your hapless body at their mercy. You conduct missions as their cyborg puppet. Their illuminati paraphernalia clues you in that they are conspiracy-addled megalomaniacs, a stand-in for the confusion of a modern age, where unwrapping the layers of control can drive people insane. The Brethren are a cabal who work in shadows and manipulate world events to the pleasing of themselves and, surely, their masters. At the center of the Brethren’s hodgepodge belief system is the desire for conspiracy: illuminati, freemasonry, the secret society of the ruling class.
Our kidnappers go on about “the true valuable commodities” and other post-modern truisms to deflect from very crude and violent actions. The player receives some space to define a character in opposition, support, or neutrality to these statements. Ultimately, the Brethren are just not sympathetic except to a sociopath or someone checking off achievements. They are diabolical upfront, murderous in the middle, and only too late try to explicitly to sway you to their side with anything but brute force. For much of the game, you have the equivalent of a loaded gun at your head as you do their bidding.
The other faction is a bit milquetoast in the face of such overweening evil. Going back to my favorite mission, it paints a painful picture of what the world became. Environmental crisis compounded economic crisis. Cities become the last gasp of the body’s organs before its diseased blood and skin taint it.
When we finally come face to face with the Rebels, they remind us that the Brethren are the greatest terrorist organization in history. It reasonably sets up that anything done to thwart such an organization is justified. Your answers in response to this line of thinking seem limp, and attacking them just feels like an exercise in evil murderhobo roleplaying. But their response feels even more limp. We will resist, and in resisting, restore the world to normalcy. The normalcy that led to the dystopia everyone is now mired in. The Rebels become an obvious stand-in for a Good Ending more than a stand-in for a point of view.
Detached from the Brethren-Rebel duality is the internal struggle of man and machine. Hallucinations, ghosts in your shell, come to your dreams and waking nightmares. These hallucinations mostly serve to tell you how to achieve the best possible ending for your character (if maybe not the world). Truth to yourself is paramount. It is an interesting choice, but I can not imagine anyone’s soul being at peace as part of the Brethren.
Parkside’s plot, beneath the anger seeping through the aesthetic, is lacking bite. The need for important choices feels added as credentials for calling itself an RPG and is superfluous to what the game actually wants to say.
Parkside has moments of unsuspecting raw beauty that caught me off guard. Deep in the interior of one mission, there is a room with little relevance to the objective. In it resides an unevenly shaped conference table with awkward sofa chairs. Sloganeering posters and flags are placed haphazardly. There are ample windows to see…the dull inside of an underground facility. It says more that it is meant to be a lived-in space, not abandoned like all the carefully crafted environmental storytelling of modern Fallout’s ruin-obsessed theme parks of apocalypse. Parkside’s world feels tired, cheap, and flimsy, crafted by a creator with unbound intensity.
This intensity gives us a full-fledged immersive sim experience that stands proudly among its influences.
