We played this game through a Utomik account; the team there having supplied us a three month pass earlier on in the year. Utomik is a subscription based gaming platform with an extensive catalogue of titles.
Telltale Games have always felt like a special piece of gaming for me. They can sometimes feel like an updated version of Shenmue in which you travel around the scene and take part in interactive segments, the only difference being, Shenmue was an open world environment which had moments where cut-scenes would require interaction from button presses or sequences during quick time events, whereas Telltale Games focus on making the player feel like they’re part of individual frames of a storyboard.
My first experience with Telltale Games was in fact where most peoples journey with the developer started, with The Walking Dead. The game was great, it had tonnes of awkward pauses between dialogue loading up, and actions taking place after a choice had been made, but it was wonderfully done. I then tried out The Wolf Among Us which felt a lot more gritty and darker in tone to The Walking Dead. Game of Thrones was next and that kind of threw me off. It didn’t feel special, it felt rushed.
The other day I put a few titles available on Utomik to a Twitter poll and the results suggested I give Telltale Games’ Jurassic Park: The Game a try. This particular title hasn’t ever really interested me, but that’s because the Game of Thrones game left a bad taste because it felt too bland and like the choices weren’t really effecting the story at all. Either way, I listened to my Twitter people and gave this a shot.
Jurassic Park: The Game starts off like every other Telltale Game. RIght into the action. There’s the usual feeling of a chunk of story that hasn’t been explained, but you know full well that things will start falling into place a bit later on in the story. You’re also introduced to an action button fairly quickly. Now see, I’m unsure how much I’ve missed of Telltales games, because I recall The Walking Dead showing mouse click interactions and keyboard buttons fairly nicely laid out, just showing up as a heads up display sort of feel with some of the click points following movements making it harder to click.
However, almost instantly I noticed that Jurassic Park’s interactive icons seem to be trying to be arty in areas and actually follow the characters body parts. Not only that but the clickable icons that require movement such as dragging seemed rather difficult to grab due to not being able to catch them sometimes due to them feeling like they were being pinned to an object in the scene and with the camera wobbling around for dramatic effect too…yeah. Wasn’t a fan of those moments, they merged too well with the scene elements whereas a heads up display feel would have probably worked better.
I totally get it, Telltale are trying to get the title as interactive as possible and not make it so easy, and while they succeed in putting the interactive moments at the right points, they seem to try too hard with the types of indications. Either way, it’s shortly forgotten when you’re straight onto the next area and wondering around the scene.
It seems that Telltale have gotten a bit precise with their indications as I soon learnt when I realised that the camera has to be in a specific spot for the interaction icon to become clickable. What happened to the see something and just click rather than see-something-and-use-the-camera-to-precisely-activate-it?
Other than what appears to be rather anal controls the rest of the title was good fun and rather similar to most Telltale games. The introduction to the system of choosing between the available frames to visit was a nice touch, although looked rather messy but felt a lot more comic book themed.
Mainly I struggled to play the title due to various bugs in which my cursor kept vanishing for no reason and required a restart, and also the cutscenes can’t be skipped which meant having to re-watch some scenes that were rather…boring. As with every Telltale game, you begin to notice that your choices for actions and dialogue don’t change the game drastically, usually just changing the path to end up on the path you’d end up on regardless of what choice you made.
That’s it for me on this title though, I didn’t play much because of the mentioned bugs, but I shall continue my Utomik title venture in the next piece!
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