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A (buggy) Jurassic lark, December 6, 2020I’ve tried to note in these reviews where I think a post-Comp release or in-Comp update would help improve a game, but usually I do that as a late-in-the-day aside. For Big Trouble in Little Dino Park, let me shout it from the rooftops at the outset: I want to praise your game, but first please fix it! It seems very charming, with a funny premise, good prose, and what appear to be some interesting puzzles. But due to myriad crash and dead-end bugs, no save functionality, and a gauntlet-type structure that kills you a lot, I found it way too frustrating to make progress. Admittedly, I can see from other reviews that some folks have managed to power through, so maybe I’m just at a low ebb after running into similar issues in other Comp games, but still: help me help you.
Starting with the positive, BTLDP is immediately grabby – the summer-intern-at-Jurassic-Park setup lets you immediately know what you’re in for, so even as you’re going about your chores you’re just waiting for all hell to break loose (and despite that, it’s still a funny surprise exactly how it all plays out). The prose has a lot of exclamation points and ensures you’re viewing things with the proper mix of terror and strangely giddy enthusiasm (I mean, dinosaurs are cool, even when they’re chewing your face off). Like, there’s this ejaculation when the beasts free themselves from their cages:
"Chaos ascendant! A return to man’s most primal nature: prey! There is only one possible path to escape!"
How can that not make you grin? It does occasionally try too hard (there’s a Mosasaurs -> Mosas -> Moses -> parting the Red Sea gag that just profoundly doesn’t work), and there are a few comma splices and misspellings – though it’s hard to fault anyone for not being able to quite come to terms with “archaeopteryx”. Still, if anything these flaws in the prose reinforce the general teenager-who’s-getting-carried-away vibe.
After the prologue, the game opens up to offer three different areas to explore in search of a way to escape, and here, unfortunately, my troubles began. It’s completely appropriate that trying to escape a park of rampaging dinosaurs involves dying A LOT, so I can’t knock BTLDP too much for this. Where I can knock it, though, is for confusing design – going to the docks kicks off what the game flags as a sort of Frogger sequence, as you need to hop between various boats to make it to the one that’s pulling away. But many of the descriptions of each potential hopping-place are unclear, much less the spatial relationships between them, and there’s an added note of difficulty because part of the trickiness of the puzzle is that you’re presented with false choices (specifically, the swamped hulks of boats you’ve already hopped on and were subsequently smashed by a dinosaur). And then once you get to the boat, I was even more confused by what happened after an additional choice (Spoiler - click to show)(what to do after one of the crew falls off the escaping boat – I thought I could try to pull him onto the boat with me, but I think what’s actually happening is you’re deciding not to get on the boat and pulling him onto the disintegrating dock?). So this leads to a large amount of trial and error gameplay.
BTLDP appears to recognize that this is how most people will experience the story, and positions it as an intended part of the gameplay by listing a death count and a rewind option each time you snuff it.
Except “each time” is overstating it, due to the bugs – I’m not sufficiently familiar with Ink to diagnose exactly what’s going on, but there were a lot of times when I’d click on what looked like a perfectly valid link – even one I’d clicked on just fine in a previous playthrough – only to have the game hang, or print out some text while not offering any further links. There’s no save functionality so far as I could determine, so each time this happened I had to play through the introduction from scratch, which unfortunately loses most of its charm the 12th time through.
I’m holding this space open for hopefully revisiting an updated version of BTLDP, or perhaps coming back to it when I’m more mentally prepared for the whiplash between the whimsical, so-you-died-no-biggie presentation and the Dark-Souls-style grimly repetitive approach currently required, but for now I can’t say I got as much out of, or enjoyed, BTLDP as I’d hoped.