Park Beyond, the gravity-defying park sim, gets beta ahead of June release

Park Beyond preview
(Image credit: Bandai Namco)

Having played a bunch of Theme Park back in the '90s, I feel well-qualified to say that running a real life theme park would suck. It might be lucrative, but it would not be fun, because there's a lot of vomit involved, and thrill seekers have a great propensity to whinge. But I feel like I could get used to the vomit and whinging if the theme park were more like the ones in Park Beyond, which are not anchored by the tyrannical laws of gravity. 

Originally set to release earlier this year, Park Beyond now has a firm release date: June 16. Ahead of that, there's a closed beta running May 9 to May 19. You can register for the closed beta test here.

Park Beyond is a management sim, yes, but actually building the rides is what I'm most interested in. The idea is to "Impossify" them, and interestingly, the ability to make things weird isn't exclusive to rides: you can Impossify shops and staff members too. You'll also need to manage visitor Nausea, and more amusingly, you'll need to manage their Newphoria, which is what happens when you have one crazy ride that renders all the other ones obsolete.

You can also  explore your park from the point of view of a visitor, and if mopping up spew isn't for you, there's a sandbox mode for worry-free experimentation. Fraser spoke to Limbic Entertainment (Tropico 6) about the game a few years ago. "Instead of building the kind of park you'd like to visit, you can create something that could probably never exist in the real world, full of rides that border on the impossible," Fraser wrote.

Shaun Prescott
Australian Editor

Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.

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