Written by: Rik
Date posted: July 8, 2022

Jurassic Park (colon: the film) came out at the perfect time for a classic early 90s multi-format release, with reviews and previews of the various different interpretations across console, home computer, handheld and new-fangled CD formats dominating the pages of magazines like Computer and Video Games for months on end, on top of all of the other marketing and merchandise that such an event movie generated.

There was even a version for the IBM PC and compatibles, as it was then, although the eagle-eyed reader will already have spotted that this is not a review of that game, and if we hadn’t already had our official credentials confiscated years ago for crimes against retro gaming, this latest offence would surely have been sufficient for us to be hauled before the Court of Old Games and charged to the fullest extent of the law. (What’s that? After careful consideration, you’ve decided not to endorse this website? Well, so have I.)

Still, this comparatively recent iteration remains a curiosity of sorts, having existed before the Jurassic World trilogy came into being (the latest instalment of which, Dominion, is newly-released, and disappointing a lot of critics, at the time of writing) and now commercially unavailable due to the dissolution of developer/publisher Telltale in 2018. Like many spin-off games, it owes its existence to an extended fallow period in the movie franchise machine, allowing it space to briefly claim prominence as an all-new chapter in the story, before the films start back up again and bury the events of any second-tier spin-offs as non-canon or irrelevant.

Jurassic Park: The Game takes place immediately following the events of the first film, with an approach focusing on unseen or briefly-glimpsed characters, allowing them to be part of a broadly contemporaneous adventure without having to share screen or story time with any of the major players. So, for example, you’ll be able to here follow the adventures of park veterinarian, Dr Gerry Harding, last seen as a moustachioed older gentleman directing Laura Dern to sift through a large amount of dino-dung, and here reimagined as a more chiselled and heroic Sam Neill type, who handily also happens to have his teenage daughter Jess visiting, with whom he urgently needs to bond. (He’s divorced, you see, and the job has made him a distant and neglectful father, etc.)

Otherwise, the main returning character is the can of shaving cream holding the stolen embryos that Dennis Nedry failed to deliver as part of his mission of corporate espionage. The quest to retrieve this can forms a major part of the plot, as does the fate of the Hardings, as well as the rescue attempt of park employees conducted by some mutton-headed mercenary types recruited by park owner inGen. It’s a familiar tale in which various characters with different personalities and motivations are put in danger and forced to work together to survive. Expect bickering, crosses and double-crosses, guns turned on each other, and plenty of dino-dodging.

As a game, the level of interactivity is on the light side, to say the least, to the extent that it almost plays like a CD-ROM video adventure from 1993 or those 80s LaserDisc adventures that were ported to home consoles and computers at around the same time, like Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. Back then, it was all part of the price you paid for full motion video clips or gorgeous cartoon graphics. Here, it looks like a game you could feasibly be in control of, except you aren’t. Telltale were supposedly inspired by Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain, a game I haven’t played, but Jurassic Park: The Game does bear some resemblance to predecessor Fahrenheit, in that it’s made up of a combination of mildly-puzzley adventure bits and action that’s controlled through quick time events (QTEs).

Both are comparatively slight, however, with adventures offering limited scope for exploration or discussion, and puzzles being fairly straightforward. Getting to grips with the interface was my main distraction, as you aren’t actually able to move your character around freely and instead simply flick between available scenes and look for hotspots to interact with. Dialogue is fairly to the point, too, with incidental questions usually batted away due to the urgency of a particular situation. There is an element of characters working together, and you switching between them, and these puzzles are mildly more taxing, but not by much.

As for the quick time events, well, I normally don’t mind them, but they come thick and fast here and soon get a bit old. Running from and dodging various beasties provides moderate excitement at first, but it sort of peaks a bit too soon in that regard, and you come to dread more of the same (and not in a good way). While there are some patterns to what actions are required – running is usually tapping a button, dodging involves the right stick etc. – there’s still an element of slightly random clever-dick stuff designed to catch you out.

Some tasks you’re seemingly not even meant to be able to complete; of the others that you can fail, some invoke a swift death sequence, forcing you to restart, while others allow you to continue with a knock to your rating. There are Steam achievements for good ratings, but no clear incentive to earn a gold star otherwise, and the game doesn’t seem geared towards letting you reset a sequence in pursuit of perfection, instead preferring to rumble the action along with whatever rating you first manage. Unlike in Fahrenheit, there are no epic-scale QTE segments to battle through, and once you get over your inevitable bungling in places, nothing will actually challenge or detain you for very long.

It’s altogether fairly strange stuff, and though you’re carried along by the ride to a certain extent, it does all feel rather unsatisfactory. When it comes to the great gaming debate over interactivity and difficulty, I’m pretty much in Team Easy Games, Story Matters, Stop Your Posturing (or TEGSMSYP, as we all call it) but this still seems like very thin soup indeed. I’m not even sure it quite gets the pacing and balance of action and adventure right, passing up quite a lot of opportunities for dialogue earlier in the game before engaging the major characters in a big heart-to-heart at the end when lives are seemingly at stake.

As for the story in general, I guess it depends on your tolerance for extending Jurassic Park beyond the first film. On the plus side, this is still on the original island, so you get a chance to explore familiar and unfamiliar areas (and play with the extremely ‘1993 movie version of a sophisticated computer system’ that runs the park), plus there’s no extra world-building stuff that goes beyond ‘we created this, it went wrong, it was a bad idea, let’s get out alive’.

(I think that’s all most people want from Jurassic Park? Not more dinosaurs, not putting them in areas inhabited by humans, not corporate politics, not extended discussions about life, ethics and genetics? I’ll happily watch them all, and will stick up for Jurassic World, and JP3 – for this moment alone – but, you know, the first one is the best one, right?)

Otherwise, I’m not convinced this adds very much that anyone really needs to see. There is a creditable but arguably slightly patronising attempt to address the issue of the disenfranchised Costa Rican islanders, but otherwise there’s little new here. Survival and escape is the name of the game: some characters are fine, some are annoying, some ‘surprises’ you can see coming a mile off, while others are genuinely quite shocking, but in a way that makes you question whether it’s because they’re well written or simply just quite hard to believe. (If you’ve played the game, or aren’t bothered by spoilers, there are some more (spoiler-y) thoughts here).

There are people of science and people of, er, guns: sometimes they work together and sometimes they don’t. Control passes between them at various points, which doesn’t help engender any sense of involvement. And as for branching storylines and alternative endings, unless you count the various death scenes in which your ham-fistedness causes your hero of the moment to have his or her head munched off by a hungry dino, it basically comes down to a single, binary choice at the very end.

Other things to note include some mild graphical slowdown and glitching, which I couldn’t sort out, but also didn’t bother me sufficiently to look into it much further, plus, there was a weird bit at the beginning with some instances of repeated dialogue. For controls, I used an Xbox pad for my main playthrough, although mouse and keys are an alternative – and seemingly viable – option.

Jurassic Park: The Game is a curiosity alright. It’s not actively bad, but not something to especially seek out, either. As with the CSI adventures, I think I had made the mistake of transposing Telltale’s later reputation, largely earned through the Walking Dead series beginning in 2012, onto their earlier titles. They perhaps hadn’t quite hit their stride by this point, and this is a little bit like those CSI games in some respects: competent, but rather limited. Probably less effort than hunting down and completing all those 90s tie-ins, if you want a taste of classic Jurassic Park action in game form, but that’s about all JP: The Game has going for it.

See also:

• Jurassic Park: Yoder Stories (spoilers!)