PC Review Code Provided by Pixelsplit Games
Indie developers Pixelsplit Games first released their theme park tycoon title Indoorlands on PC via Steam Early Access back in 2021. Today, 15 months and 5 major updates later, they are launching the finished version of the game! They do have a few more updates planned to come in the future and after playing the game myself I can confirm that there are still a few things that would be worth fixing, but let’s dive into if the game provides the tycoon experience fans of the genre are looking for.
Gameplay
Just as with any tycoon title, you are given a plot of land to get started and then encouraged to build up from there. They do have a quick tutorial set up to help you understand their HUD and give you an initial sense of where different things are in their menus. Honestly, the tutorial itself is very well done and after you go through it you should be able to run your own park without much problem.
After you leave the tutorial and actually start up a fresh park without a guide, you can get started. You will be able to pick from a number of different terrains, but since your park is indoor’s, this is purely for aesthetic reasoning. When you get started, you will have little goals to meet in the form of milestones. There is a milestone for your park management and a milestone for customer satisfaction. As long as you keep the park balanced, you should be set well off.
For the beginning of the game, don’t stress too much about the layout of the park. I was particular with every shop and ride placement at first, but with so little space to work with, it gets frustrating. Instead, aim to make everything functional and make sure you have enough restrooms, cleaning, and repair buildings to cover all the open areas of the park. Your initial goals should be to reach the first handful of milestones, earn some research points to unlock more stuff in the research tree, and make enough money to buy more plots of land.
Once you have built up enough of the park that you have at least six plots of land, then it would be worth pausing the game and completely resetting up the park. This would give you enough space and the experience you’ve gained personally from reaching this point should work well enough that you can have a fair idea of how you want the park to be laid out. Personally, I did what you might see from fairgrounds - I got the mid-sized buildings unlocked and set up a repair, warehouse, and cleaning building next to each other than built the shops around it. Simply repeat that setup, facing in different directions and leaving an opening for the workers to travel through, and you will be able to have the whole park filled up with all the different shops, games, stores, and so on. You can check on how close buildings need to be to each other because they always show an effective radius so you know how far the work building’s reach is.
As you continue to work on your park, you will randomly get event moments that pop up. They are all typically bad but have a positive reward. Earning money on this game is super easy, so I always went for a research-based reward with the events. I found that letting all buildings break and having one of every tag in the park are the two easiest ones to deal with. If you have enough repair buildings around, which I suggest having them close enough so that their radius circles overlap, then everything is fixed with almost no effect on customer satisfaction.
Of course, we need to talk about the rides themselves. Every ride that you can place in the park, which you will see a seating capacity and a reputation rating for each ride before you pick it, can be ridden. It is a bit of a weird setup, but you simply click on the ride that you want to check out and select Enter Hall. This is what you have to do if you want to decorate the hall yourself, but there are pre-built options to choose from as well if you see a theme you like. Once in here, you will see four different camera options and by selecting the right camera, you will get the view from inside the front row seat of the ride thus allowing you to ride the ride yourself. I did take a moment to personally decorate a couple of my halls, but this does eat up some time and the park will keep running while you are in there if you don’t pause time. The good news is that decorating is pretty simple and you can always unlock more options in the research tree.
To focus on roller coasters specifically, they have pre-built options just like the ride halls, but you can build them yourself as well. I found the controls to put a roller coaster together to be a bit difficult to work with, but they don’t actually follow the laws of physics so once you get the hang of it you can do whatever you want. Just know that the very first post needs to be almost touching the front of the track so you can put the chain lift or speed boost close enough that the train cars actually catch and then at the end of the track you don’t connect it yourself but rather place the last piece before the final connection and then back out so it will complete the track itself (even if it would be a broken fix). While I am happy with my own built coaster, I can see some people struggling with the control style as it was hard to move the camera just right and get the track to not be tilted.
Audio and Visual
When you are simply working in the park, I can honestly say that the music is almost unnoticeable. You can pick from a few themed song options when you are inside a ride hall though which was neat. Other than that, the only sound effects you hear are the occasional theme park noises, customer crowds, and small sound effects to indicate something breaking or something specific happening, good or bad.
This game has the exact graphical quality you would expect, honestly. When I think of theme park tycoons, I think of small customers, buildings that fit on a grid, and enough graphical detail that you can tell the different themes and atmospheres going on. I like that they had bigger character models when inside of ride halls and that you can see all the nuance stuff, like cars coming and going, the people walking around, the gold highlight on a customer that won a VIP, and so on. I also like that they have the options to have no walls, some walls, and full walls so you can see what it looks like in full, but it also made me wish they put more detail on the higher end of the different themes as the walls would become a base color towards the top in the bigger rooms.
Replayability
As long as you are having fun building a new theme park, there is always replayability. Even if you don’t want to start a new park, once you have enough money, it wouldn’t hurt you any to dismantle a ride and replace it with another one or more specifically remove a roller coaster just to place a new one that you want to build up yourself.
What It Could Have Done Better
There were still a few bugs that they seem to need to tackle, most evidently in the repairman department. Sometimes I would have to save the game, go to the menu, and reload my game just to get the repairmen to actually repair buildings. There was a specific spot where I placed the Ferris Wheel and it would never get repaired no matter what so I always had to sell it, save and reload the game, then replace it when it broke.
Sometimes if I was going a bit too quickly or placed too many tasks at the same time, the game would crash completely. Thankfully, it auto-saves every 5 minutes so I never lost much, but it was still pretty frustrating.
Maybe just a complaint on my end here, but it just felt like such an easy game with no real challenge. Anytime I came across an actual issue, I just had to sit for a moment to let my money collect a bit. It would have been nice to have some kind of challenge actually push back against my success but it didn’t take long before I was making money so much faster than any cost of upkeep that I would be gaining a million dollars in a matter of 4-6 minutes.
Verdict
Indoorlands is a well-designed theme park tycoon that is perfect for beginners and those looking to have a relaxing tycoon experience. I thoroughly enjoyed my time on the game and was able to fully complete my park how I like it. The idea of an indoor-only theme park is definitely interesting on its own and so it was nice to be the one to run it myself. Definitely a tycoon I would suggest for others to try out.
Indoorlands is available now on PC via Steam.
