Big Trouble in Little Dino Park

by Seth Paxton profile and Rachel Aubertin

Adventure
2020

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Number of Reviews: 11
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Generic PC escaping marauding dinos, January 4, 2021
by verityvirtue (London)
Related reviews: sanguine

You play a kid working your summer job in a theme park with a teeth-grindingly twee theme. But everything goes wrong when the dinosaurs are let loose!

It’s technically sound, though some proofreading would have ironed out a few typos here and there. It did have the breadth I expect of an IFComp game, though with the multiple ways to die I almost expected a running tally or achievement board.

The biggest thing for me was that I found it hard to be invested in the player character. With few details on who the player character is, the stakes for their survival becomes relatively low. The way the story is laid out also means the player’s first time navigating the park is during the attack: without me, the player, being able to make a plan, the deaths might as well be random.

The setup is not bad, really; with more preamble and more distinctive characters I might even get invested in it. But as it is now, it feels more like a skeleton not given enough flesh.

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Fun if you like dinosaurs , December 6, 2020
by brwarner (Vancouver, BC)

A game for anyone who loves Dinosaurs and Jurassic Park. It has fun with the tropes and lets you relive a variety of dino outbreaks (is it a spoiler to say the dinosaurs get out? I don’t think so). Not my cup of tea personally, as someone who could barely pronounce half the dino names. This is the kind of game where there’s ten ways to die in each scene and I’m not sure there was a clairvoyant way to really know which action was going to succeed and which was going to fail. To be fair, as those kind of games aren’t for me, it’s possible I just wasn’t invested enough to look for the clues. I think this will really appeal though if you have a favorite dinosaur, as the game lets you choose in which part of the park you’d like to be employed.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A (buggy) Jurassic lark, December 6, 2020
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2020

I’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.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Should Have Spent 60 Days, December 6, 2020
by Joey Acrimonious
Related reviews: IFComp 2020

Big Trouble in Little Dino Park puts the player in the shoes of an ennui-afflicted young person working a menial job - until you are thrust into a struggle for survival.

Apart from a few typos, I found the writing enjoyably witty, with some amusing riffs on the little (and not-so-little) absurdities of life. The introductory part of the game, which situates the protagonist in the vacuous world of commercial dinosaur exhibition only to plunge it all into chaos, showcases some of its best writing and does a great job of setting the tone quickly and concisely.

The game’s weak point is in how it executes its choice structure. The thing is, there’s a certain finicky path to victory. Once you’ve felt out that path, then you can work deliberately toward a couple of clear goals, and make a couple of decisions that have some moral/emotional weight to them. Good stuff. But until you’ve stumbled across just the right event to set you on that path, the choices mostly consist of pressing random stuff and hoping it doesn’t get you killed, with little apparent tactical or emotional reason to choose one option over another (except perhaps the knowledge of what got you killed last time). This phase of the game, I think, doesn’t play well to the strengths of the choice-based format, which is at its strongest when each choice comes with a sense of gravitas and agency.

I hope the authors will keep at it and give us more games in the future. With a different and more refined game design that more fully takes advantage of its engine’s strengths, their compelling writing could shine even brighter.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Fun story, several bugs, a guess-the-solution game, December 1, 2020
by Denk
Related reviews: Ink

This game made in Ink has a short but well-written fun story. It is definitely a game, not just a story since there are many ways to die. There is a sort of Undo feature ("Try again") if you die. Once you complete the game you are told how many times you died and how many people you saved. A nice touch I think. In theory, it should be possible to save 4 people it seems. However, I only managed to save 2 people. So there is definitely a game element.

Unfortunately, it has several bugs. Sometimes a choice made the game freeze. At other times I ended up in a situation with no choices so I couldn't proceed. I got the impression that the game was more stable if I closed the window each time I wanted to restart the game. A drawback of this approach is that the game then cannot count how many times I died. Perhaps it was just certain choices that made the game freeze.

Another problem is the choice-based equivalent to "Guess-the-verb" in parser games, which I call "Guess-the-solution". That is, to complete the game you just must guess the right choices when there is no way you can predict what is the right choice. And then you must memorize your previous choices so you know what to do and what not to do next time you play.

That isn't necessarily bad, it is just that choice-based games have come a long way since the early days with choices such as "Do you want to go left or right?", which is only a matter of guessing and remembering your previous playthrough. This game gives more interesting choices than "Left or Right?" but roughly, it is the same thing as the old CYOA books.

Still, if the bugs were fixed I might have given one or two more stars, depending on how well the parts of the story I couldn't get to were written. I hope the author makes a bug-fixed post-comp version. Then I would probably play again.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Jurassic amusement, December 1, 2020
by AKheon (Finland)
Related reviews: IF Comp 2020, choice-based, Ink, comedy

Big Trouble in Little Dino Park is a choice-based comedy game made by Seth Paxton and Rachel Aubertin, published in 2020. The game is a parody of Jurassic Park, where you, a reluctant summer employee, have to survive a particularly grueling work day at a cheap knockoff dinosaur park.

The gameplay consists of clicking text links to move around and make decisions. The game opens up after a linear beginning, but even at its most complex it remains a fairly relaxed affair where you don’t have to think about your choices too hard. Game overs are frequent, but you can usually just retry from previous choice if that happens, so it doesn’t impact progress too much.

The writing is exaggerated and comical, as you’d expect in this type of comedy. At times it feels like the humor is a bit unfocused and shallow since the pace of the game is thunderously fast - it doesn’t dwell on any scenario or idea for particularly long. In addition, (Spoiler - click to show)later on the tone changes to something slightly more serious as you embark on a rescue mission, dampening the pure carefree comedy factor here.

Some more polish wouldn’t have hurt, as there are a few typos here and there. I also found one game over link that just flat out didn’t work, forcing me to restart the entire game.

I would’ve personally preferred either a sillier or a more fleshed-out and well-paced story, but still, the game can be amusing, and it’s clear the authors love dinosaurs from the way they name-drop so many different species here. The game could be worth a try if you’re a fan of Jurassic Park, dinosaurs and fast-paced madcap comedy.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Thrills, chills, and the omnipresent threat of violent death., December 1, 2020

I enjoyed exploring the question at the heart of this entry: "What if Jurassic Park gave summer jobs to disaffected teens?" Things quickly change gears from summer job to survival challenge as catastrophe strikes and you must find a way to escape the park's hungry inhabitants.

Some descriptions made it difficult to tell where I was in the park, or where I wanted to go, but other passages updated to show how my previous choices had changed the situation. In some places, like the Dinosaur Nursery, it seemed like I was repeating passages that were only supposed to display once.

This entry could have used more polish, but it's entertaining in its current state. The authors explain that Big Trouble in Little Dino Park was created in 30 days, which explains why it includes a substantial number of typos.

Parts of this experience felt like living in one of those horror movies where the main character is alerted to obvious danger. I appreciated having the option to just go somewhere else, although calculated risks were necessary in a few places.

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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Keep your dinosaur manual handy, November 19, 2020
by RadioactiveCrow (Irving, TX)
Related reviews: About 15 minutes

Bottom line on this game is I did not enjoy it and don't think it is worth even the 15 minutes it took for me to die twice. You play an employee of a dinosaur park (a Jurassic Park knock-off which is ubiquitous in the game world) on the day when another employee goes crazy and opens all the cages. You have to escape from the park somehow.

I just didn't care about any of it, not the characters, not the "puzzles", not the writing. If you die (no real way to tell that's what your choices will lead to) the game will let you restore from the point where it all went wrong. I died twice and restored, trying a new path, but before I even got to my third death (or perhaps victory) I got bored and quit playing.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Escape from a Jurassic Park knock-off, October 21, 2020

With a parody title that signals wackiness from the start, Big Trouble in Little Dino Park is a choice-based game heavily inspired by the classic Choose Your Own Adventure style, which follows a disaffected teen as they try to escape from, well, you can guess where this is going.

The setting and writing are hilarious, with very strong world building and snappy dialogue. Also, the amusing deaths and twists feel like loving throwbacks to CYOA, although I also like that there appears to be thought put into creating a puzzle that can potentially be solved to actually escape.

Unfortunately, the CYOA influence is a double-edged sword for me, because the experience can be frustrating. There’s a lot of branching leading to dead ends with trial and error required, and many choice points have that CYOA feeling of choosing between “go right” vs. “go left” with random-feeling consequences and little sense of agency. One other note is that while I appreciate the large sense of scale to the park, in some sections like the boat hopping scene it’s difficult to spatially follow what’s happening.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A medium-length Ink game escaping from a Dino Park, October 19, 2020
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

This is a medium-length Ink game where everything breaks loose at a dinosaur park.

I saw this game with one of the authors guiding us through it at the Seattle IF Meetup. I appreciate the witty humor and the world model that lets you travel around.

I think there are a few things that need to be ironed out. There are instant deaths without undo, but it does have save points to help you restart. A bit more troubling is that there is often not any indication of what path is most likely to lead to success. This was typical of CYOA books, but those books allowed instant undo and instant traversal to any page at any time. I’ve often thought that successful ‘puzzly’ IF is based around making the player feel smart, so giving them hints to pick up on is really helpful.

The other thing that I think could be improved is the story pacing. I think the big moment in the middle needed a bit more buildup. It’s possible that there were more clues hidden in some of the options, but as Emily Short has recommended in the past, if you’re writing a branching game make sure that it’s impossible for the player to miss your story. If a beat is essential to understanding what’s going on, make sure that story beat is hit in every playthrough.

Otherwise, I found this game fun. I couldn’t get to an ending (in the Frogger version, the best I got was rescuing a guy out of water before dying, and in the lab, I got in a weird repeated cycle where I kept getting ‘sneak’ and ‘distract’ and one other option, and I couldn’t figure it out). Glad to see Ink being used!

-Polish: There were a few typos (like helicoptor) and the laboratory ending with the dinos seemed off somehow.
+Descriptiveness: The writing is full of interesting descriptions of things.
+Interactivity: Even though I was frustrated, I felt like I had real options near the end.
-Emotional impact: I felt like there needed to be one or two additional scenes for buildup before dramatic sections (that set up the feeling or more tension)
+Would I play again? I'd like to find a successful ending.

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