Hot off the heels of their Back to the Future game, Telltale is back with another license close to the heart of my youth: Jurassic Park. It takes risks, leaving behind the traditional point and click interface of their past games for something a little different.

The first of the two demos I played was exclusively an action scene. Several of the game’s protagonists were stuck on a roller coaster and I had to prevent them from being eaten by a pack of dinosaurs. The solution? Successfully complete a lot of quick time events including button presses and quick flips of the analogue stick. You could sum up the entire action demo simply by saying “Space Ace”.

But there was a weird layer of detachment added to this scene. The character whose actions were affected by my inputs constantly changed. This made me feel less involved with what was happening on screen since no singular character represented the player. Occasionally I’d fail and watch a death scene before snapping back to the last checkpoint. I watched my cart go on the wrong track into a pack of dinosaurs, a young girl falling out of the car to her death and more, all while my death counter rose.

If this was all the game was, I’d be pretty sad. Thankfully the second demo I played was far more interesting, though still different than Telltale’s previous games.

The adventure demo had me in control of a mercenary woman named Nima accompanied by Miles Chadwick. Nima was clearly ignorant of the island, not knowing that it was full of dinosaurs, but Chadwick seemed to know everything going on. These were Dodgeson’s people that Dennis Nedry intended to hand off the shaving cream can full of dinosaur embryos to (before being killed by a dilophosaurus in his jeep). It’s this tie-in to the original story that makes the plot of Telltale’s game so intriguing. Making it so closely linked to the first novel and film without retelling it is a smart idea.

I found myself in the delightfully familiar locale of where Nedry’s jeep was stuck. Despite not seeing the can in the jeep, Chadwick insists on checking it more while sending Nima to accomplish the far more dangerous task of searching the surrounding area.

Nima has tracking skills. By holding buttons corresponding to different areas, I could have Nima closely examine various elements of the environment such as footprints. Strangely, I had to hold the corresponding button down until my search was complete. The whole thing gave me some serious Heavy Rain vibes.

Never did I find myself walking around as any character. Instead, I could bring up a shortcut menu to move to different areas of the environment. While in each environment, I could use the analogue stick to move the camera around a bit allowing me to examine more things.

In fact, examining things was the name of the game here. The closest I came to encountering a puzzle was when certain areas I attempted to examine were too dark. I had to move up to the jeep and adjust the lights mounted on top to aim at different areas to aid my search. I also occasionally conversed with Chadwick, but my dialogue choices seemed of little consequence. I either chose the right answer, or something else then the right answer. Hopefully the puzzle and dialogue aspects will get more complex further into the final game.

Eventually, several dinosaurs showed up and I transitioned into another quick time event driven action scene, complete with checkpoints and a few failures on my part. It at least felt more interesting transitioning from a calm scene to an action one, but it’s still hard to get too excited about quick time events in 2011.

I left a little torn about Jurassic Park: The Game. On one hand, the setup for the story has grabbed my attention. But on the other hand, the action gameplay is not particularly enjoyable. It’s definitely feeling more “interactive fiction” than game so far, even moreso than a traditional point-and-click adventure game. But if the adventure parts introduce more actual puzzles instead of the “look here, now look here” execution I’ve seen thus far, I could forgive the action scenes.

Tags: adventure games, hands-on impressions, Jurassic Park, PAX 2011, PC, preview, ps3, psn, QTE's, quick time events, Telltale Games, xbla, Xbox 360

This entry was posted on Monday, September 5th, 2011 at 5:00 am and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.