South Park: Snow Day is a 3D co-op multiplayer action game coming in 2024
Second time's the charm
Long-running animated series South Park has been blessed with two surprisingly good RPGs, the Stick Of Truth and the Fractured But Whole, which both accurately recreated the TV show's art style. The newly announced South Park: Snow Day is taking a different approach, rendering Cartman and its world in 3D for a four-player co-op action game. It's also being developed by first-person indie darlings Question. You'll find the trailer below.
Cartman is in his fantasy wizard garb again, as all South Park games seem to realise that they need some way of bringing in magic or fireballs to an otherwise realistic mountain town. It also seems as if you'll again be taking control of a customisable "new kid" in town, rather than one of the existing characters. Beyond that, all there is to know at this stage is that it's a snow day and it's coming in 2024.
Development studio Question were founded by Jordan Thomas, who is best known as the level designer behind the Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows, Fort Frolic in BioShock, and as creative director of BioShock 2. Question themselves previously released The Magic Circle, a first-person puzzle game that grappled with auteur-led game development, and The Blackout Club, a multiplayer horror game that cleverly incorporated elements of live performance. I'm choosing to think of their making a South Park project as being akin to Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach making a Barbie movie.
THQ Nordic are making a big deal about how this is South Park "in three-dimensional glory", which I suppose has a bit of novelty to it. I assume they would rather I didn't remember that this has happened before. Iguana Entertainment and Acclaim released a first-person 3D South Park game in 1998, which had singleplayer and multiplayer and which was set mostly (entirely?) on snowy levels in which you fought with snowballs. It was dismal and South Park's creators famously hated it.
I suspect South Park: Snow Day will be better, if only because it can't be worse.
South Park: Snow Day was announced last night as part of the THQ Nordic showcase, alongside the announcement of Titan Quest 2 and a new trailer for Outcast: A New Beginning.