Jurrasic Park was one of our most anticipated games we got to see at Gamescom in Cologne a few weeks ago, as it's made by one of our favourite developers, Telltale Games. They're the brains behind some of the best point-and-click games of recent years (and past, seeing as a fair few of their employees came from LucasArts, the point-and-click gods of the 90s), such as the awesome Sam & Max series and the Tales of Monkey Island games, inspired by the old Monkey Island series starring 'mighty' pirate Guybrush Threepwood. In fact, if you haven't tried it already, you really should download some Sam & Max. It's awesome and if you like puzzles and humour, you won't regret your time with the sociopathic rabbit Max and suit-wearing canine Sam, who make up the Freelance Police, as they solve bizarre cases of hypnotism, pay a visit to Ted E. Bear's Mafia-Free Playland and Casino, attend a zombie disco organised by a camp German vampire and much more. After some gushing about how awesome Telltale are, and a bit of pestering about whether the Xbox Live Arcade would get the third season of Sam & Max any time soon, we finally got down to the game at hand - Jurassic Park.
Set after the events of the first Jurassic Park film, on the island of Isla Nublar where the film took place, the game aims to tie up some lose ends - like what happened to Dennis Nedry (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Valve's Gabe Newell)'s Barbasol can full of dinosaur embryos, and the fate of the park.
Around halfway through the film, Dennis Nedry, who was being paid to steal dinosaur embryos for one of Jurassic Park's competitors, is due to meet a guy in a boat to hand them over - but crashes his jeep and subsequently gets attacked by a dinosaur, letting the embryos slide down a cliff and get buried in the mud. The question Jurassic Park looks to ask is - what if the people Nedry was working for had attached some sort of tracking device to the container, just in case something went amiss? This is where Jurassic Park: The Game begins, with Nedry's contacts having employed a woman by the name of Neema - who grew up on the island - to help them locate the lost embryos and find out what became of their man.
Even if you haven't seen the film, all that's important to know here is, you're going back to Jurassic Park - and while things have changed, the most important bits (i.e. the dinosaurs) have mostly stayed the same.
Roar indeed.
And so, in a darkened room in Germany, our demo began. Like the rest of Telltale's games, Jurassic Park is a sort of point-and-click game, only this time round, there's been a slight change of pace. Feeling more like an adventure game than a traditional point-and-clicker, there's still be plenty of exploration to do - only things seem a lot more fluid. Approach a scene with numerous things you can interact with, and a picture of a button will start to glow above each of your options - as ever, it's important to choose wisely - as we found out.
The demo began with Neema and her companion Miles stumbling across Dennis' crashed jeep, at the top of a smallish cliff, which Neema wastes no time in scaling. Climbing the cliff took the shape of a quick time event, where buttons appeared on screen, and you had to press the right one when prompted. Once we reached the top, we found the jeep was looked - and hammering the A button forced open the door... releasing a little dinosaur that knocks Neema to the ground, whilst revealing the corpse of Dennis sitting back in the drivers seat. This lead to a discussion between Neema and Miles about what to do next - and, in traditional point and click style, you could choose what you wanted to say from a number of lines, depending on where you wanted to take the conversation. Examining the area in and around the jeep, a number of buttons appeared on the screen, highlighting certain objects of interest. After choosing two of the "wrong" options, and only finding a pair of glasses, and some tracks, we eventually found the canister of dinosaur embryos. Mission successful - or so we thought. We still needed to get off the island in one piece.
Tut tut Dennis - your battery's going to be flat if you keep leaving your headlights on like that...
Walking along a quiet, dark road, Neema and Miles suddenly get attacked by a Dilophosaurus - a dinosaur which spits poison in an attempt to blind it's foes - which shoots out from the undergrowth. In a moment of cowardice, Miles shows his true colours, and uses Neema as bait while he tries to make his escape, can in hand. Not being the most agile of back-stabbers, karma ensures he finds himself on the wrong end of a Dilophosaurus, as Neema manages to escape - so long as you manage to follow the button prompts that appear on screen. Taking the form of an interactive cutscene, Neema's escape sees you moving the Right Stick to dodge, hammering X to run, and following a number of other prompts - with each successful button press avoiding one of the dinosaur's attacks, complete with fancy animations, like hitting the dinosaur in the face with a car door and the like - just like you'd expect in a film. And while missing the odd button won't kill you straight away, missing several in a life or death situation will result in your character's demise - which is actually a first for Telltale games. Those, like us, who sometimes struggle with things like this should rest assured, though, as Telltale's Designer/Writer Mark Darin assures us that they "want everyone to get through it... [and] see the whole story", meaning it should be pretty forgiving.
For the Jurassic Park fans among you, you might be interested to know that Universal Studios have given Telltale full access to the music and sound effects from the films - including the iconic dinosaur noises, which are all taken direct from the film. You'll also have the opportunity to visit locations like the Marine Facility, where the aquatic crocodile-y dolphin-like dinosaur Mosasaurus is kept, as well as meeting some of the dinosaurs previously only mentioned in the films, like the Troodon, a small bird-like beast. If that means anything to you, you're obviously more of a palaeontologist than we are.
It's a croco-phin-osaur!
As something of a departure from the usual Telltale formula of a comedy-infused, slow-paced, puzzle-packed point-and-click games, Jurassic Park feels more like an interactive film - and certainly does its part staying true to the films. Seemingly taking influences from recent, story heavy games like Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit, with a release planned for the 15th November in America, and Telltale aiming for a similar sort of time for the UK, there won't too long to wait before the game starts bearing down on you like a hungry T-Rex - and we can't wait.
Although it may seem a little unusual, Jurassic Park will be available in two ways - one for Playstation, iPad and PC owners, and the other for those who play on the Xbox 360. On PC, iPhone, and the Playstation Network, Jurassic Park will be offered as a series of five downloadable episodes - presumably with a decent discount if you buy the entire season at once - while on the 360, the whole thing will come together, on a disk on shop shelves. There's no word on pricing so far, but we'd expect them to work out similarly to their usual stuff - somewhere in the region of £15 to £20, or probably around £30 for the disk based game, taking into account the extra production costs, but we'll let you know when we know more. Needless to say, after seeing the demo at Gamescom, November can't come soon enough - from what we saw, and with the team they've got behind it, it's safe to say Jurassic Park's shaping up to be something special.
Jurassic Park is available episodically as a download on the Playstation 3 and PC, as well as the full season on a disc for the Xbox 360. We previewed the game on the Xbox 360.
