Much of the long-term success of the South Park series rests on the shoulders of its often crude humor and biting satire. That’s something that spilled over into the last two mainline South Park games, The Stick of Truth and The Fractured But Whole. While they looked on the surface like South Park-skinned RPGs, both offered innovative gameplay alongside the satiric bite we’ve come to expect from South Park. Not so with South Park: Snow Day!, a repetitive 3D co-op beat ‘em up that brings nothing new to the genre.
It doesn’t help that Snow Day! seems aimed exclusively at franchise fans. Whereas The Stick of Truth re-introduced and built upon many of the fantasy alter-egos of the main cast introduced in episodes of South Park that parodied The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, Snow Day is mostly content to rehash familiar jokes tied to, say, Cartman being a “Grand Wizard” and Kenny playing a Japanese-speaking princess stereotype. Even the original section of the game’s plot—revolving around a mysterious, seemingly eternal blizzard that’s killed a lot of townsfolk and, so far as the kids are concerned, closed the school—ultimately serves as a mild continuation of a one-off Mr. Hankey episode from 2018 “The Problem with a Poo” (and climaxes with a Dune-riffing boss fight that dimly echoes the majesty of 2001’s Conker’s Bad Fur Day).
That plot finds Cartman, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny going to war across familiar South Park locations, from Stark’s Pond to Main Street and the abandoned SoDaSoPa projects. In each area, our young heroes are tasked with completing various missions. And while many of them are in the delightfully crass spirit of the show, like collecting used condoms to repair the rubbery mechanisms of a makeshift catapult or making a delivery to the Chamber of Fragrant Mysteries (a lofty name for a portable potty), each amounts to nothing more than hacking through a bunch of enemies. That routine gameplay is ultimately at odds with the writing’s humor and charm, and every good joke landed serves only to remind players how shallow the combat is.
Snow Day! is a roughly five-hour roguelike, split across five discrete 40-minute levels with scant variety between them. You and three other compatriots (friends, bots, or a combination of the two) play as the same New Kid character, and with only three melee weapons and three ranged attacks to choose from, you’re all basically doing the same thing. There are also eight powers, like cat piss that temporarily brainwashes your foes (an homage to the 2008 “Cheesing” episode of South Park) and an automated snowball turret, but because some are clearly more “OP” than others, you’ll likely see a lot of overlap here as well. Almost mercifully, there’s some variety to the enemies you encounter, from hockey-armored sixth graders to swarming first-graders, but you’ll still feel as if you’ve seen all that they have to offer on the combat front by the third level.
The game’s roguelike structure also exacerbates that sense of “been there, done that,” in that Snow Day! isn’t meant to be beaten in a single run. The game forces you to return to the Kupa Keep hub between each level, regardless of success or failure, resetting your skills and having you freshly select the next (or the same) mission. The only persistent growth comes from the Dark Matter (read: Mr. Hankey’s magically enchanted fecal matter) that you collect throughout, which allows you to make permanent upgrades to your overall health or attack.
The game’s difficulty, especially given the inept bot partners, is intentionally imbalanced to make you replay already completed levels before advancing to newly unlocked ones, literally grinding shit until your base New Kid is (ironically) slightly less shitty. Until then, your character moves too slowly, hits too weakly, and dies far too quickly. This is particularly irksome considering that you have to replay an entire level if your whole party is simultaneously wiped out. Trudging through the game’s snowy, same-y landscapes quickly comes to feel intolerable, especially when there’s no longer a fresh cutscene or joke to look forward to. Save for a few branching paths here and there, there’s little beyond the Dark Matter-gathering necessity to encourage one to replay any level, and, indeed, every run through a level is duller than the last.
Each level in South Park! begins with a formal declaration of war between your leader, Cartman, and the rival faction that you’ll be fighting. In this moment, Butters adjudicates as you each select modifying powers for that stage from a card binder called the Book of Laws. (After you’ve beaten the game, one of the Goth kids will offer you additional Infernal Pacts to increase the difficulty.) “The process works,” says Butters, but when you consider that much of the game’s plot is a direct repudiation of such stifling rules, it’s no wonder that Snow Day! feels so dysfunctional. Despite being occasionally funny, the game is never fun.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Dead Good Media.
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