If you’re familiar with Loot Level Chill then you may know me as the “work sim” guy. Whether it’s powerwashing, mowing lawns or working on the dock, I enjoy games that explore things typically considered normal or mundane and often find them quite relaxing, meditative experiences. Set in the beautiful (and fictional) Faremont National Park, Ranger Path: National Park Simulator seemed like a shoe-in for some nice, chilled out gaming but instead left me frustrated and wanting to go back to my cabin.
As with lots of these games you start things off as a new recruit and you spend the first hour or so learning the ropes. Faremont National Park is lovely, but also completely dilapidated in places, seemingly plagued by a scourge of vandals kicking down signs, overturning bins and smashing fences. Much of your time as a park ranger is essentially spent as a handyman, with an array of tools in your pocket that’ll help you fix up everything that’s broken. Each task is accompanied by a mildly enjoyable mini game, usually timing based as you try to hammer a nail at the right point or swing your axe to chop apart debris.
Photography is also part of your remit as a park ranger, surprisingly, with you regularly being asked to catalogue the flora and fauna found around Faremont Park. I’m not entirely sure why, as an established national park, these aren’t already catalogued but either way it requires careful use of your camera to get the right shots. It’s not particularly complex but can be quite frustrating trying to get the right things in frame, especially when you’re not 100% clear on what it is you’re looking for.
Finally, in a Papers Please-style twist you’ll also be asking visitors to show their permits to make sure they’re not in the park when they shouldn’t be and that their permit allows them to camp or start fires or whatever it is they may be doing. You’ll need to use your judgement to determine whether or not they’ve breached their permit and then reprimand them accordingly. If it’s 12.01pm and their permit only covers morning access then a verbal warning might suffice, but if they’re in the middle of setting up a tent when they aren’t allowed to camp then booting them out of the park entirely could be justified.
The problem with all of the above is none of it is particularly fun. It’s not even relaxing, as you’ll need a certain amount of XP to unlock the next story mission which means being bombarded by mission requests by your pal on the radio, who replies rather passive aggressively if you turn any of them down. This led to me basically walking around each trail (which gets highlighted helpfully on the minimap when you’re on it) and looking for stuff to fix or tidy up. I guess that may be the reality of being a park ranger but it didn’t make me want to play more than a couple of hours. You’ll also be driving to and from different parts of the park in a truck that handles like a tank, but other than getting to admire the scale of the park I don’t feel like this really added much.
It’s hard to judge the game’s visuals fairly as I was playing on a Legion Go 2 handheld PC. It’s clearly got a good sense of scale: the park feels suitably large with multiple interconnecting trails to walk and different scenery, vantage points and picnic spots found along the way. Even on lower settings it looked quite nice at times, but performance left a lot to be desired and even with things as low as they could go I found the game was hitching regularly. Images used in this review are from the Steam page, and if you’ve got a more powerful or conventional setup than me then it looks like you can expect quite a pretty game.
There may be some work sim fans out there who will enjoy Rangers Path but unfortunately I wasn’t one of them. Between the never ending list of things to repair and the constant badgering with side missions I didn’t find my time with the game anywhere near as relaxing as an actual stroll in the woods would be.
