T-Rex Time Machine

School isn't going great. Your rival screws you up with his powerful connections and influence. Your professor gives you a failing grade. Getting expelled is right around the corner.

That said, you create a time machine and travel back to the age of the dinosaurs. With this earth-shattering discovery at your disposal, you might just be able to turn things around.

There isn't much in terms of plot as you navigate the dinoscape and work out your relationships with your friend and rival. Mostly, it's a collection of encounters with different types of dinosaurs, along with a couple of danger scenes to get the blood pumping. There is a stat system, along with different things to collect (samples, film, trophies, etc). Presumably, some of these collection options are connected to your stats, but the impact wasn't very apparent.

Not to mention, collecting these things didn't seem to be of much use, as the professor later threw all my findings out, pretty much declared me a fraud, and expelled me anyway. I mean, I brought a ton of souvenirs back from the prehistoric era, including a real living dinosaur. Are you seriously telling me you're not interested?

Frankly, if someone showed up today from a trip to the age of dinosaurs, complete with souvenirs, photographs and a living dinosaur, they would have been an international sensation on the spot. Yet, the entire ending just feels so ridiculously underwhelming. Granted, the rest of the world treated those discoveries with somewhat more interest than that very dense professor, but it still left me scratching my head.

Dinosaur fans may enjoy the romp through the land of the T-Rex. Still, the way it ended felt unsatisfying.

This game is fairly short (170K words but with a lot of branching, so smaller playthroughs). In it, you play as a young academic who has invented time travel. You use it to go back in time to study, hunt, or film dinosaurs while dealing with a rich kid who has stolen your credit for inventing time travel.

Skills were fairly easy to figure out, although they didn't vary much throughout the game. There are a few romance options, although most are on your rivals' team. The writing in each scene was well-done, and I felt like I had a variety of goals I could accomplish.

The overall plot, though, just didn't make sense in my head, and didn't mesh with my experiences or expectations. The way that people react to the existence of time travel, the things your character fixates on, the way people react both in the past and when you return, it just doesn't make sense to me, personally. But the rest of the game is not bad.