Video games are no stranger to Central Park, and over the years, many games have let us take a stroll through the iconic New York City landmark. The park has often been represented in games that are set in the city that never sleeps — sometimes as itself, and sometimes under a pseudonym. For example, inGTA 4’s New York analog Liberty City, it got the thesaurus-ass moniker Middle Park. InMafia 2’s Empire Bay, it was named Lincoln Park.
Whatever you call it, it’s a defining feature of New York City, and for developers sick of brick and mortar, building a patch of greenery in the big gray city must come as a breath of fresh air. That’s the role it serves for the player in Insomniac’sSpider-Mangames, where it offers a unique bit of terrain that challenges Peter and Miles’ ability to swing without skyscrapers.
Spider-Man 2 made this easier with its introduction of Wingsuits that the arachnid avengers could use to soar for long stretches without thwipping a single thwip.
Nobody Wants To Die Gives Us The Central Park Of The Future
The world ofNobody Wants to Dieis already aesthetically interesting enough, rendering its cyberpunk version of New York with ample neon, art deco architecture, and vintage cars flying through the air. It didn’t need a Central Park, and it wouldn’t really make sense for trees to survive hundreds of years into its dystopian future.
And, to be honest, I was slightly disappointed that the game was headed there instead of showing off more of its metropolitan landscape. The back half of the game spends too much time in cramped crime scenes and not enough showing off its incredible urban vistas. Yet, when I saw Critical Hit’s spin on the iconic location, it won me over.
That’s because its Central Park feels like an extension of the urban environment surrounding it. In 2329, the park has no actual surviving trees. Instead, they’ve been replaced with holograms. From afar, it seems that the trees are spotlit. But once you get down to ground level, you realize that this bit of nature in the midst of the concrete jungle isn’t organic at all. No, the bases of the trees are little mechanical pedestals projecting holograms. The branches sway in simulated wind, but if you look closely at the leaves, you may tell that they’re translucent. As your detective character James Karra flies down to the park, he notes that it’s a perfect metaphor for the perp he’s tracking, “a forest of fake trees that last forever without actually being alive”.
Is It Really Central Park Without Real Trees?
In this way, Central Park becomes a metaphor for the game’s key sci-fi conceit, ichorite, the substance that allows denizens of its far future to live forever by preserving their consciousness and passing it from body to body. In the same way that this isn’t really cheating death, just prolonging the inevitable, the trees are a hollow simulacrum of the real thing. People can live forever… but only as long as there’s a steady supply of new bodies. These trees can live forever… but only as long as there’s a steady supply of electricity.
Most importantly to me, though, this Central Park just looks cool, with a hulking Giger-esque statue towering over the trees and the concrete behemoth of the city hanging above it, to the sides, and below it. It’s the perfect marriage of ideas and aesthetics, and that’s exactly what I want from my cyberpunk games.
