When I heard that Telltale Games was going to develop a video game based on the movie Jurassic Park, I was excited, intrigued, and a bit ambivalent. Excited because Telltale Games is by far [intlink id=”3058″ type=”post”]my favorite video game company[/intlink] for the excellent work it has produced the last few years in reviving the adventure-game genre that LucasArts turned into an art form back in the 1990s. Intrigued because Jurassic Park seemed to be such a departure from the company’s other titles, which mostly involved sitting back, clicking on stuff, solving puzzles, and having a good laugh at witty dialogues. Ambivalent because I was worried the company might be stepping too far out of its comfort zone with a game based on a movie packed with fast-paced action and which had already spawned no shortage of action games, and frankly, I didn’t want another shooter game.
The ambivalence grew back in the spring when Telltale announced it was pushing back the release of the game until the fall while it improved the mechanics of the game. The game finally came out a few days ago, and since I’ve been sick and stuck at home with a fried brain and clogged sinuses the past couple days, I spent some of that time trying out Jurassic Park.
The game, like other Telltale products, comes in an episodic format, though unlike others, all the episodes were released in one package this time. I’m about one-and-a-half episodes in, and I can already say with confidence that this was well worth the wait and that Telltale has really outdone itself.
The game picks up where Dennis Nedry met his doom in a stranded jeep back in the original movie. In the movie, Nedry, the not-so-fleet-of-foot programmer who squabbled with the park’s creator over money, was on his way to deliver smuggled dinosaur embryos to his contacts from a rival corporation when he ran afoul of one of the parks’ carnivorous inhabitants. The game spins off of that loose thread and looks at what happened to his contacts. The other main characters in the game so far are Dr. Gerry Harding — who got about two lines in the original movie as the guy who tranquilized a triceratop for the visiting scientists — and his teenage daughter, who were also left stranded on the island before they could get to the evacuation boat. As our characters traipse through the jungle, we get hints that there are even more menacing creatures lurking than the T-rex and the velociraptors.
Telltale did a terrific job revamping its traditional interface to replicate the action-packed, edge-of-your-seat feel of the movie. There is still a version of the familiar point-and-click interface you find in many adventure games where you click on a hotspot to examine or use an object and solve a puzzle to advance the plot. However, the game also makes frequent use of the direction keys on the keyboard for action sequences. For instance, if you’re hacking your way through the jungle, you see directional arrows on screen at certain times, and you have to press the corresponding direction key at the right moment to cut your way through. There are also times when you need to keep tapping a key to complete a strenuous action, such as pushing a crate over a ledge.
At times, this new interface might seem unnecessarily complicated (“Why must I press three different arrow keys to load a tranquilizer gun?” I thought at one point). However, it really shines when you’re in a fast-paced sequence, which happens A LOT. Frantically tapping the up and down arrow keys to crawl out from under a pile of debris while a T-rex is about to stomp on you really makes you feel like you are in one of the scenes from the movie where the humans are pumping their arms and legs as hard as they can to try to outrun giant predators. Upping the stakes is the fact that, unlike other Telltale games, you can actually die in this one (and there are many painful and humorous ways to go, as one can imagine). Thankfully, if you do end up as T-rex bait, you are automatically transported back to the start of the action sequence to try again rather than losing all your progress up to that point.
I do have a couple minor complaints about the new interface. The picture-in-picture scene navigation — where you switch between different parts of the scene to control different characters (cutting as a director would, as the developers put it) — feels a bit unwieldy at times. The other complaint is that often you can see a hotspot on the screen, and yet you have to pan your field of vision over more before you can interact with it. While an admittedly minor point, over time this does add up to quite a few extra clicks to accomplish simple tasks like examining an object. Fortunately, so far I haven’t encountered any situations where those extra clicks interfered with an action sequence and left me in the jaws of a dinosaur.
While the gameplay mechanics are unlike anything Telltale had done before, the storytelling is as good as you would expect from a company that literally has made its name with storytelling. One difference, though: Instead of relying on the witty, sarcastic tone that permeates many of Telltale’s other titles, such as Monkey Island and Sam & Max, Jurassic Park faithfully captures the cinematic experience and the suspense of the original movie, leaving you expecting a raptor behind every tree and always waiting for a seemingly tranquil scene to turn into a heart-pounding chase. The game even employs some familiar Hollywood devices, from the one-dimensional minor characters whose fates are obviously sealed the second they set foot on the island to the old adage that nothing ever happens in a movie without a reason (Harding’s daughter tells dad that she has a big Spanish test coming up, and then two scenes later we find her having to piece together broken Spanish phrases to communicate with another character).
In Jurassic Park: The Game, Telltale masterfully weaves a new interface with the good traits that have become hallmarks of its games. The result is an experience that not only tells an interesting story, but also puts you right in the middle of the action and often leaves you on the edge of your seat like the movie did.
A behind-the-scene trailer from Telltale
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