Haven Park (2021)

Haven Park borrows a lot of ideas from A Short Hike. It looks and plays similar, and aims to tell a similarly heartwarming story in a short duration. However, while A Short Hike succeeding in making its world and characters compelling, Haven Park struggles to keep you invested.

The gameplay here involves exploring a nature reserve park for camp sites, and repairing the park in general. You also get some quests from the campers that you meet along the way. Exploration is straightforward, but you might be blocked along the way and forced to take a detour. Figuring out how to get to each camp site can be a bit confusing. The map doesn't help much. Once you get to a camp, you build things there to attract campers and keep them happy.

The supporting mechanics mesh into each other, but not in a good way. Camp sites need new buildings to attract campers, and you need resources to build them. Exploration gets you the resources, but you are limited to carrying a specific capacity with no long term storage. There's a skill that expands the carrying capacity, but it might take some grinding to reach there because other skills take priority. This can lead to situations where you're carrying too much of a single type of resource, preventing you from building new structures and progressing through the game. There's a market that allows you to trade resources, but surprisingly it's a structure that you build yourself, making it susceptible to the same resource allocation problem.

The game's art style is pretty, cute and colorful. Sound is minimal, and music is somewhat repetitive. Dialogues are not voiced.

I didn't go into this game expecting to do resource management, but that's ultimately what the game asked me to do. I wouldn't say that I had a poor experience with this game, but I didn't quite enjoy as much as I expected to.

J'ai aimé A short Hike. J'ai aimé ce coté mini open-world, j'ai aimé l'ambiance, j'ai aimé les personnages plein de personnalité, j'ai aimé la variété des quêtes. Malheureusement à vouloir être trop proche de son modèle, Haven Park ne fait que souligner la différence de niveau et ce n'est pas en faveur de notre jeu.

Primo, le résumé du jeu ne reflète pas vraiment le gameplay du jeu. En fait, il faut marcher sur la map pour découvrir des camps. Sur ce camp vous devrez allumer un feu et grâce aux ressources accumulées sur le chemin (bois, tissus, métal, pièces) poser sur le camp un ou deux item de chaque catégorie (hébergement, nourriture, repos, décoration, activité). Le nombre d'item de chaque catégorie vous est imposé et il n'y a pas assez d'item différents pour réellement parler de personnalisation. Il n'y a qu'un seul chemin possible pour visiter tous les camps, le jeu usant et abusant de la technique du "oh non, ce chemin est barré !". Il est d'ailleurs très compliqué de naviguer d'une zone à l'autre même après les avoir toutes débloquées car il n'y a pas de vraie progression de notre personnage, pas de capacité qui lui permettrait de voyager plus vite, pas de voyage rapide depuis la carte...

Si on ajoute à ça des commandes pas toujours réactives, des problèmes de collision et des chemins pas toujours très bien identifié et une carte sur laquelle on ne peut pas zoomer on arrive à une progression laborieuse...Et pour un simulateur de ballade c'est vraiment dommage.

En plus le jeu avait plein de bonnes idées: un outil de placement de meubles libre permettant une rotation à 360°, des bornes numérotées pour connaitre son emplacement précis sur la carte, une direction artistique jouant avec le tilt-shift, cet effet qui donne une apparence de jouet au décor et que l'on retrouve entre autre dans le remake de Zelda Link's awakening...

Malheureusement le jeu n'était pas à la hauteur de ses promesses...

Playtime: 102 minutes (71% completed... or something)

Review

Haven Park is a game about finding resources, trying to find your way around, backtracking a lot, repairing broken objects and building the exact same handful of things in each campsite. Outside of campsites you can only repair streetlamps and fences, you don't get to place your own. Campsites are small areas where you build the exact same campfire, bench, vendor and tents each time. There are a few other things to build, but half of them are locked behind a skill that requires two level ups early on - when you want faster movement and more resources instead.

Aside from the dull building element there's almost nothing to this game. A couple of lines of dialogue at best (not voiced, of course). There isn't even any half-decent music. What are you supposed to get from this? I've literally seen more creative asset flips.

This is another cozy exploration game indebted to A Short Hike, but with less platforming and more crafting. It’s lovely, charming and delivers on its premise: I enjoyed myself.

I do think there’s room for improvement:

• I cringed a bit when I saw a specific craftable item and verified that the creators are not indigenous people of North America. @BMO seems to have summarized this issue well already.
• The gameplay loop incentivizes you to leave campsites worse than you found them, in my opinion. You end up littering the landscape with tacky food carts and Ferris wheels and cabins just to gain the SP necessary to improve exploration.
• The diversity of environments ramps up a lot at the end, making for a comparatively slow start.
• There are some typos. Overall the writing feels more serviceable than delightful.

If you enjoyed A Short Hike or Lil Gator Game and you’re hungry for something similar, you could do a lot worse than Haven Park. Just set your expectations accordingly.

I didn't enjoy it as much as I enjoyed A Short Hike, but I did have a good time playing it through. I think the map was lovely to run through and the gameplay was relaxing. I like the campsite customization feature too - gives you a little something creative to do. I think some of the interaction dialogue could be improved, but overall the side quests and missions are cute and fun.

I would say to give this a shot - it's very lovely and heartwarming, perfect for a cozy afternoon.

This looks super cute. I just wish studios that don't have a connection to indigenous cultures wouldn't appropriate indigenous imagery/iconography. I know this studio is based in Germany and is probably not up on discourse surrounding the appropriation of indigenous and First Nations people in North (and even South) America, and I know that they are probably using things like the tipi/teepee because those structures have historically been appropriated through camping and Summer Camp practices, but I do wish devs like these would think about the implications of the images they use and reflect on what it means to include something that has such a long history of appropriation. I know a lot of people will look at a tipi and think nothing of it, or think that it is just another cute structure for their camp in this game, but the systematic incorporation of indigenous imagery and items into North American summer camp culture and structures has long been linked to the erasure of indigenous cultures (and especially to the residential school system in Canada). So I just wish devs would be more critical of the images they use before throwing them in a game.

For those interested in more on the relationship between camp culture, and specifically the role of programs like Girl Guides of Canada and other Scouting organizations played in the residential school system and reeducation of Indigenous youth, a good primer is Prof. Mary Jane McCallum's thesis To Make Good Canadians: Girl Guiding in Indian Residential Schools.

Grabbed this yesterday and played for about an hour this morning.

Definitely understand the comparison to A Short Hike, as it feels quite similar (you're a birb exploring the island), but it doesn't feel as...quaint and heartwarming as ASH. It has aspects of a build-your-town mobile game in a way, as you find campsites around the island and need to build them up using the few types of resources that you pick up. There's not really a time limit or anything though, and you can explore freely, so it's still relaxed.

You do get experience points for picking up resources, fixing lamps/torches, and building the campsites, and then you get skill points when you level to make exploring and finding resources easier. Pretty simple system.