Well, I went around to a couple playgrounds in the past week or two, but nothing really spoke to me. I can't just have a first episode without something new to talk about, hell, the last set of these I did at least had the spooky park with the winding path and the darkness and the... yeah I dunno. It was just a good opener, what the fuck am I gonna do now, I thought to myself as I roamed the lonely streets in search of stupid wheels to spin around and shake my head at slowly.

But then... It revealed itself to me. An idea, though perhaps not a good one. They say there's a first time for everything, so today I bring to you the first indoor playground of this entire series.

Now, I know what you're thinking. How did I manage to not only approach an indoor playground without getting shot to death by the police, but manage to take photos too? Well, there's a story there. Eau Claire Market is a rather surreal downtown mall, not quite abandoned, but not quite... functional either. There are stores here, I would even say that most storefronts are technically occupied. There's a movie theater too, though not a busy one.

However, all the stores are deeply bizarre, ranging from weird esoteric things like fortune tellers and a strange Egypt-themed bootleg artifact store called "Son of the Pharaoh" that sells a large amount of cheap gold painted crap and not much else. The mall and surrounding areas were pretty popular in the 90s, and it very much looks like something out of the 90s, but it started slowly dying for some reason, and now it's one of the few places in the city that not even local homeless will loiter in.

Anyway the point is, the food court where this playground was located was completely empty except for one extremely miserable looking motherfucker eating some Vietnamese food in the corner, looking at nothing else besides the contents of his own plate and the sins weighing down on his soul. He's probably not in any of these photos, but if he shows up in the background, there's your context.

Regardless, I was safe, so let's proceed.

So, this is the playground. Is it particularly unique? Not really. It's a pretty standard prefab playground, though thankfully my old enemy the Blue Imp is not appearing this time around. Some of the design elements from this place, as you'll see later, also show up in some other playgrounds I've looked at in previous years, though I'm not about to put a conspiracy board together to try and figure out which elements exactly. I don't care that much. Maybe I'll look through the archives later. Maybe not. But first, a look around the perimeter.

The first thing to note is that the ground here is composed of one of the worst materials on my tier list. Generally, my ranking is as follows:

Shredded Tire > Sand = Gravel >>>> Wood Chips >>> Pavement

While its hard to argue that shredded tire is the softest of the materials, I find both sand and gravel to be similar, with sand being softer but worse than gravel at cushioning a fall. Wood chips though, like we see here, are frankly a crock of shit. They're a bit softer than gravel, sure, but they can give you splinters, which is probably the third most most unpleasant sensation a human being can go through. The second most unpleasant is smashing your head open on asphalt, which is why pavement is the worst flooring. The first most unpleasant is burning to death, but until napalm flooring takes off with the parent-teacher associations, we're safe on that front.

There's a few of these peg maze things on the wall with this mural here - a few meaning two because the one in the middle has vanished. Did someone steal it? Did it break? I dunno, thinking about it makes me feel a bit melancholy. It didn't even get replaced, come on.

Thankfully, I can quickly pivot over to the rules, several of which I am breaking just by being here. There's not much to say, they are quite reasonable rules for sane people. The bottom corner, which is probably too hard to see in that picture, says that the playground was donated by "CDC Recreation Inc." though, which might finally give the manufacturer behind some of these an identity.

Also there's literally a bar right across the way. Very classy.

Okay, onto the playground itself. This is about where I started to feel like some of the imagery was similar. I definitely have come across some of these storefronts before. Up the stairs are a couple slides - a metal one and a double slide made out of hard plastic. Not a fan of the metal one, it's too small and also covered in wood chips. That last part isn't the slide's fault I guess, but it's just not appealing. The same goes for a slide covered in anything though. The plastic ones are fine, you go down fast and the plastic doesn't feel gross. Maybe a bit short, but there's some other taller slides up the way a bit.

Alright fine I'll talk about the fucking wheel.

The meme wheel, coming out fast on the first playground of the garrison, is... flaccid. It's just kind of dangling there limply. I guess it got pulled on too hard or something, probably by some drunk guy from the bar just over there. You know actually, a bar/playground combo venue would probably make some money, drunk people would eat this shit up. I would know, as I am usually at least slightly intoxicated when I do these. Sure it'd be unsafe, but with a couple waivers and some good insurance...

Anyway I don't even want to look at the thing anymore.

Doing a bit of a lap around the taller of the two towers that make up this structure, I found that beyond the monkeybar thing that bridged them, there were several other ways to climb up. A bunch of metal rings, these spiral stairs, and a climbing wall. The rings are functional and I like how they look, but the stairs are fairly unpleasant as you're meant to climb them by grabbing ones above, but they have plastic between each loop that makes it hard to get a grip. Speaking of shitty climbing though, the climbing wall is some utter horse shit. The rocks don't come out far enough from the wall to stand on, and there's NO ROPE so you have to sit there and just eat shit until you give up and take another way up.

Not gonna mince words, this thing sucked as a grown man. It'd REALLY piss me off as a kid. Don't like it.

Underneath the tower is a tic-tac-toe wheel array. A common feature of many of these playgrounds, this one is in the upper ranks of these in general by default by virtue of just having the symbols required to play tic-tac-toe and not random animals, plants, or objects. Good job, CDC Recreation.

Only other thing of note is this panel emblazoned with the image of a plane. That'll make sense later.

Later meaning... right now. On the last tower itself, I'm met with two slides and yet another meme wheel, this one stuck to the backside of the plane panel, which also has some fake dials and such to make it look like a control panel. It's better than the other one, and also there's the bare minimum effort put in to make it look like the wheel is for something instead of just being there attached to some wall.

That long red wavy slide is great, very slick, very fast. First good slide of the garrison, which isn't saying much when there were only two prior and one of those two wasn't even bad. I might be overrating this one admittedly as I haven't used a decent slide in years literally but I "like" it in the sense that it doesn't hurt my ass and it's clean. It's definitely the best slide of this place, and that's because the spiral slide's curves are too tight and its nigh-impossible to slide down if you're over like 5'5.

Is this my fault for not being the recommended ages of 2-10? Almost certainly. However I choose to blame the architects for this one, because they should have anticipated the coming of this day.

And that's the park located in the most depressing mall in the city for you. Our first actual indoor playground.

It sucks.

Look, it's not a 1/10 or anything, it's just poorly maintained and otherwise unimpressive. It's got a grand total of one good slide, is a significant splinter risk, and the surrounding venue is pretty depressing. There's shit that's just broken and hasn't been replaced yet. Both the mall itself and probably this playground too are supposed to be demolished eventually and replaced by a new one anyway though (no word on what'll happen to the shitty egypt store however), so really... who cares.

I suppose in a way, this may end up being the last chronicle of this place, unless someone else is psychotic enough to go review a shitty playground from the 90s. Unfortunate then, that it's pretty bad. This place will forever go down in history for earning only a measly...

4/10

love a good bizarrely specific tat store

a bar playground sounds like a hilarious concept. that would probably work

this really doesnt seem like that offensive a playground, but as you said it's not very maintained.

i still dont understand the plane/vehicle shit on some of these. i get the wheels but not the fake control sets.

the playground looks pretty fun but being inside in a playground is the most depressing shit