Provizora Parko

This game has a heady, dreamlike feel. In it, you explore a kind of abandoned zoo or city or something, and interact with a lot of people and things, especially birds.

I didn't see until afterwards that it is explicitly framed as a purgatory, but that makes sense. It's kind of like a text version of What Dreams May Come, but stripped of all explicit moralizing.

I encountered a lot of mysterious and compelling scenes, some making the use of delayed text in a surprisingly effective way, such as in the luggage carousel full of masks. Birds are a recurring theme.

This doesn't feel like a pleasant world to be in. Statues are ugly, people are cruel or crass, decay is everywhere. But it feels like a place to move on from, a place that shapes and refines you for good or for bad.

Very compelling game. Due to its overall grimness, not one I think I'd revisit, but one that I could recommend to others.

“You are on a beach, tenderly burying another version of yourself in wet white sand. The you that’s being buried looks up and winks.”

Provizora Park is a game by Dawn Sueoka, an author and gamemaker whose work is always thoughtful, carefully constructed, and a little (or a lot) surreal. Details are cleverly sprinkled in or omitted, and characters sincerely chirp odd non-sequiturs or simply bemoan their presence in this place where you've all found yourselves. All of them seem to have given up the possibility of understanding it, but not you.

Lushly detailed and funny, the game blends insouciance and the creeping illogic of a nightmare. Takes about a half hour to play. I loved it.

A bizarre and beautiful game. As given by the description, you are in purgatory after having apparently... died? But the nature of your death, or even your life, doesn't matter much. It's not that kind of story. Instead of learning about who you were and what you've left behind or that stuff you often see in those "I died and now must come to terms with my existence" stories, you're just wandering around a strange bird park and having strange encounters with strange people. At the end of it all, you... transcend? It's not entirely clear.

This one Youtuber made a video about how game journalists will describe every single game as a combination of some other game, and I think about that every time I tell myself "this thing is just like that thing plus that other thing", but I'll do it here anyway. Provizora Parko is a bit like You are Standing at a Crossroads meets Beautiful Dreamer. Like You Are Standing at a Crossroads, it has a bizarre purgatorial world, a sense of unease and "how do I get out of this?", questions answered only by more questions, and many allegorical happenings. But the overall tone and ending are far more lighthearted, which brings me to the second comparison. It shares with Beautiful Dreamer a strong sense of whimsy and a world that feels consistent in a strange way, adhering to a set of unknown rules, even if those rules aren't at all explained. And both have strong writing.

Is it that similar to either of those games? Not really. But I'd recommend them if you liked this one. Play more games, they're fun.

Time to finish: ~10 min

Quote:

Every evening, a stork would peer into a lake looking for fish and shrimp to eat. One night, under the full moon, her shadow spoke to her from the bottom of the lake. “Come join me at the bottom of the lake. But you must pluck out your eyes first. You will not need them any longer.” So the stork plucked out her eyes and passed into the world beneath the surface. Only a few drops of blood remained on the water, but soon they, too, disappeared.