‘South Park: Snow Day!’ Marks the Return to A Place ‘South Park’ Hasn’t Been in 10 Years

When you’ve been waiting for the bus for almost 30 years, you might as well just walk.

South Park: Snow Day!, the first fully 3D South Park game since the ill-conceived cart racer South Park Rally in 2000, finally launched on Tuesday to a lukewarm response from gamers and critics. In the newest South Park title, Trey Parker and Matt Stone made a drastic departure from the turn-based RPG-style games of Snow Day’s two narrative predecessors South Park: The Stick of Truth and South Park: The Fractured But Whole, choosing action-adventure, multiplayer-friendly hack-and-slash gameplay to continue the storyline of the game series.

While fans of the last two South Park games may be turned off by the new features of Snow Day, old-heads have reason to celebrate a return to the franchise’s roots. As a user in the South Park subreddit recently pointed out, thanks to Snow Day, Stan, Cartman, Kyle and Kenny have finally returned to the bus stop for the first time in a decade. You’re getting old.

In the very first scene of the series, the four boys stand around at the bus stop arguing about dildos and discussing Cartman’s “nightmares.” Starting in “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe,” the bus stop served as the de facto meeting place and hangout spot for the core four throughout the series, serving as the setting for so many of the most memorable moments in South Park history. Then, a little more than 10 years ago, Parker, Stone and their writers started to phase out the most iconic backdrop in all of South Park.

The last time Stan, Cartman, Kenny and Kyle were all seen standing at the bus stop in the show was when they were talking about the popular YouTuber and streamer PewDiePie in the 2014 episode “#REHASH.” Since then, the bus stop has been used for establishing shots sans characters, and there was even a meta moment when Wendy, Theresa, Isla and Heidi had their own bus stop hangout mirroring those of the main boys in “Moss Piglets” back in 2017. However, all four boys haven't been seen waiting for the bus in a single episode since “REHASH,” a realization that made one Redditor simply remark, “I feel old.” 

Of course, there have been practical reasons why the four boys haven’t been able to have their usual shit-shooting sessions over the years. For instance, the Marsh family’s move to Tegridy Farms in 2018 and Cartman’s not-brief-enough stint living in a hotdog stand in recent seasons. However, there’s something deeply sad about the fact that, with new South Park episodes so few and far between in 2024, our best shot at seeing the boys in their element again is in a game that IGN just called “the most toothless South Park adventure ever created.”