Park Beyond wants theme park builders to be fresh and imaginative

Limbic Entertainment has gone just about as far as it can go with the city building Tropico franchise. Now that El Presidente has conquered the world, where the does the house that created him go next? The answer is to go from city builder to theme park builder. However, Limbic isn't content to make another Roller Coaster Tycoon-like game to add to the pile. In Park Beyond, Limbic wants to see where imagination can take this tried-and-true idea.

Limbic and publisher Bandai Namco have a single word that they want to use to describe Park Beyond, which was first revealed during Tuesday's Gamescom Opening Night Live showcase. That word is "impossification." Limbic describes "impossification" as something that's based in realism, but ultimately something that can't fully be experienced in real life. Park Beyond is filled with these types of moments. Picture a standard, on-rails roller coaster that reaches great heights with loops and S-turns. Then picture a spot where it gets loaded into a cannon and blasted across the park, where it then lands safely on another set of rails without losing any momentum. That's the sort of idea that Limbic is shooting for with their take on this classic genre.

However, impossification can go much farther than that. Imagine a submarine ride where a giant squid can pick up each of the cars, shake them around, and then safely deposit them back on their track. This can also extend to shops and restaurants, where players are encouraged to create the type of architecture that isn't typically seen in an everyday theme park.

The key to getting anywhere in Park Beyond is to learn its various mechanics, which is where Limbic hopes its single-player campaign will succeed. The campaign will tell a story centered around the idea of impossification, teaching players Park Beyond's various mechanics and features. Part of the story will involve pitching ideas to common solutions to a Shark Tank-like board of directors, where players are encouraged to come up with something that's both practical and outrageous. Each of the board members specialize in a certain aspect of running a theme park and will impart their knowledge onto the player.

Another major component to building a park that pushes imagination boundaries is freedom. Park Beyond will utilize a full creative suite that includes voxel-based terraforming tools. This allows users to completely shape the theme park's layout to their liking. They can create mountains for sky-high coasters, rivers and other bodies of water for water-based rides, and even floating landscapes for totally surreal shop and restaurant designs.

Of course, a player shouldn't keep their imaginative creations to themselves. Park Beyond will feature a slew of sharing options, where players can save blueprints of their designs. They can either share entire parks or share individual components to allow others to place them in their own laughing place.

Bandai Namco and Limbic Entertainment hope to give players more than enough tools to push the limits of what a theme park can do. The cannon module and ramp module will both be a central component of the playable demo at Gamescom, but they're also promising that dozens of other modules will be available on launch day. Park Beyond is coming to PC (via Steam), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S in 2023.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?