Penko Park Is Like Tim Burton Made Pokemon Snap

thegamer.com:

New Pokemon Snap is one of the best first-person shooters in recent years, and it’s right up there for me with Apex Legends and Doom Eternal as one of the genre’s brightest sparks. If you think a game needs a gun to be an FPS, then you’re sorely mistaken and need to broaden your horizons. You shoot a camera just as much as you do a gun, and in an alternate reality where Doom was a photography sim, we’d all be getting excited for Canon of Duty right about now, a game in which you are a war photographer trying to take the best shots of a fictional war-torn region. We’d all be waiting decades for a sequel to Pokemon Gun in this reality too I bet. New Pokemon Gun.

My gripes with genre names aside, I’m surprised there aren’t more first-person shooters with photography angles. Pokemon Snap was a revelation when I played it on the GameCube (it was ported) back in the day, and its modern iteration is one of the most fun Pokemon games I’ve played for years. That aside, Aotearoa indie Umurangi Generation is the only photography-focused FPS that comes to mind. You should play that, by the way, it’s excellent. But why do the majority of developers feel like you need a strong IP like Pokemon to make photography games work?

Related: Pokemon Snap Would Have Been Perfect For Nintendo Labo

Penko Park doesn’t. It takes a lot of inspiration from the original Pokemon Snap, but also iterates on it in ways we can only appreciate after New Snap was released. Penko Park came out around six months before New Pokemon Snap, so it’s unlikely that the latter took any direct inspiration from it, but both made eerily similar updates to the classic Snap formula. And with Penko Park’s creepy vibes, those changes feel doubly disconcerting.

Developer