South Park: Snow Day seems like it would be an ideal Christmas game. A third person cooperative adventure set in Trey Parker and Matt Stone's fictional Colorado town, it sees you battling through its icy streets, banding together with Cartman & co to save your home from an endless winter. That'd be ideal for whiling away the long winter evenings with three of my pals. But forget all that because it's coming out next March.
The game first poked its head out of the snowdrift last August, before receiving a formal reveal at this year's THQ Nordic showcase. It's being developed by Question, best known for spooky multiplayer immersive sim The Blackout Club, and formerly creators of The Magic Circle. Question was also a support developer on South Park: The Fractured But Whole, and is closely associated with Trey & Matt, so the designers know their Kennys from their Kyles.
The THQ Nordic reveal only provided a broad overview of the game, which is a kinda looter-shooter, but a more recent trailer places slightly greater focus on the in-game action. It certainly looks and sounds the part, and Question has done well with the difficult job of translating South Park's defiantly flat aesthetic into 3D. I'm yet to be convinced by the in-game footage that's been shown, although that's partly because there's so little of it.
But South Park games can go either way. The Stick of Truth is a fantastic RPG that frankly doesn't get talked about enough these days, while The Fractured But Whole was a perfectly decent follow-up. Then again, South Park is also responsible for one of the worst games ever made, the appalling 1998 shooter that received a score of 8% in PC Gamer.
We won't have to wait long to find out where on the South Park scale Snow Day falls, as it'll explode across your raincoat on March 24th next year. The price for the standard game will be $30/£25. There's also a deluxe edition priced at $50/£40 that includes an additional game mode, and extra cosmetics and weapons, and a £190 physical edition that includes, among other things, a talking toilet roll holder.
