Haven Park (Switch eShop) Review

Browsing is a big problem in some video games; you just have to look at something like Breath of the Wild or A Short Hike to see that. Haven Park leans heavily on that idea and shares some DNA with the last game we mentioned. Especially since you play as a bird.

Haven Park sees you controlling Flint, a young bird who has been tasked with repairing and maintaining an island that apparently belongs to his philanthropic grandmother. It’s packed with points of interest, natural beauty, and most importantly for the game, camping. You’ll be gathering shelter-building supplies and food sources for eager campers looking to assert themselves in their coin-operated hospitality as you peruse and tour the landscape on offer. This side of things is pretty basic, but it does provide a fair degree of freedom and much-needed respite from homeless people who might otherwise be aimless.

And wandering really is the problem in this gaming donut if we hadn’t already made it clear. Finding campsites, searching for the truth about the rumors you hear from campers, finding the mushrooms needed to build a working radio (yes, really) – it all leads you down a new path or three to discover something new. It’s certainly a pleasant surprise to hear about a person’s hidden treasure, only for another camper to provide more details leading to a chance to uncover the promised loot, but sometimes Haven Park falls short of the difficulty mark.

Sometimes the puzzles or goals are ridiculously simple, which would be absolutely fair if some others weren’t unusually obtuse. One of the most prominent submissions made us read a kind of book Choose Your Own Adventure and, at one point, forced us to retrieve a shovel in the world in order to progress. Despite not making much sense, Flint also exclaimed that he saw a shovel in ‘a construction area’, but without giving any other indication of where it might be on the island. We finally found it embarrassingly close to the book we were reading, but calling up two warning signs, a shovel, and a pickaxe in a little dive, a ‘construction site’ felt a bit confusing at the time, and without a note what we were on. looking for a way to reread the book and began to guess if we had not read or misinterpreted everything.

The movement also needs a little adjustment in our eyes. For whatever reason, if you brush against a tree or a rock, you freeze almost as if the object is extremely sticky. Most games simply have your character dodge the blockage or even go through it entirely, and considering how many flickering bushes litter the picturesque landscape, it can be a bit tedious having to navigate with such precision. Eventually we started jumping and running almost constantly to avoid this.

But despite all this, we still really enjoy our time with Haven Park. The images are well done with ambitious depth of field and particle effects (which reduce performance, but we think it’s worth it), and making our way to the higher parts of the island slowly but surely felt enough. exhausting to be rewarding.

Conclution

Haven Park is a delightful game that suffers from a bit of weird movement choices and a partially under-baked camp-building system. These cons aren’t deal-breakers by any means, but they do make for something sour that could have been a truly outstanding example of a healthy, bite-sized little game. We’re still happy to recommend it, but don’t expect the same level of polish as other bird-based island exploration excursions you can find on the Switch.

Oh, and if you press ‘A’ with nothing to interact with in front of you, Flint says ‘Pew’.