Jurassic Park frightened me as a child. Dinosaurs are creatures of wonder in so many ways, and it’s still hard to believe that these towering animals walked this planet millions of years ago. Film, television, and literature have done a compelling job capturing this magic, with Jurassic Park being the most famous example, but I struggle when thinking up a worthy parallel in video games.
Obviously there are famous games featuring dinosaurs, including a number of Jurassic Park tie-ins as well as classics like Turok and Dino Crisis, but none of them properly capture the horror these animals instilled in me as a child. To know that if a velociraptor or a T-Rex rocked up in front of me, there would be no reasonable escape. I wouldn’t have a gun or the athletic ability to outrun them, and chances are they’d already be on a rampage. I’d be nothing more than prey for these nightmares of nature to envelop me.
I’ll always have a soft spot for the arcade rail shooters based on Jurassic Park 2 and 3, which do a brutally violent job of recapping each film with epic stages and boss battles.
Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Video Game of the Movie - yes, that’s the full name - is the only video game that has come close to capturing this paranoia. Thrusting players into a first-person perspective, much like the upcoming Jurassic Park: Survival, often you had no choice but to turn around and sprint blindly in the hope you covered enough distance to make it out alive. If you didn’t, a jaw swallowed you whole, or took a sizable chunk out of your health as our protagonist struggled to keep moving. You can’t defend yourself. The dinosaurs shrugged off bullets like they were nothing.
I haven’t been able to capture that feeling since, especially not with dinosaurs. I miss it, and sorely believe that video games are capable of producing games about dinosaurs that aren’t about blowing them to pieces or depicting them in an absurdly exaggerated light. Imagine if you were suddenly facing up against a dinosaur in reality - you would not see it as just another animal.
You’d be clueless and terrified, and it’s hard to believe video games have taken advantage of this idea so rarely without inevitably framing us as a higher power. What we’ve seen so far from Saber Interactive’s upcoming game teases a take on the franchise I have been waiting to see for years. We don’t have weapons, nor anyone to help us, we are defenseless scientists with a smart head on our shoulders, but that will do little to help satiate an island full of angry and confused dinosaurs now free from captivity. Similar to games like Alien: Isolation, we are a fish out of water who gradually learns how to make use of limited resources and crafting to distract and harm dinosaurs, but never kill them.
Your focus is to scare them away, so you have just enough time to crawl into a vent, or to dash into the visitors centre in search of a kitchen to seek shelter in. Little slices of horror perfectly blended with exploration and wonder, because who is to say a game like this is unable to capture both the wonder and terror of the films that inspired it? Like the respite throughout Jurassic Park 3 when our heroes aren’t being attacked by the spinosaurus. At times, they are able to sit back and realise that mother nature isn’t so bad when mankind isn’t trying to engineer it for profits. Dinosaurs are just doing their thing, which unfortunately means eating us if we happen to get in their way. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jurassic Park: Survival makes a big deal about highlighting that the T-Rex who stalks us throughout the game is the very same creature from the films, right down to distinct markings or coming across the wreckage of jeeps and buildings we already have distant experience with.
We’ve only seen one trailer and the briefest snippets of gameplay, so there is no way of knowing if Jurassic Park: Survival will ever be the game I’m willing it to be, but there definitely is a chance. That, for the first time in my life, a video game will view this series, which is so close to my heart, with the horrific reverence it deserves. Dinosaurs are beautiful, yet are equally capable of terrible things because they are little more than creatures out of time acting on the basest of instincts. Having to defend ourselves against that unknown and successfully make it out alive could make for a masterful horror experience.
Survival Week at TheGamer is brought to you by Nightingale - available on PC in early access February 20
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Survival Week
Welcome to the home of TheGamer's Survival Week, a celebration of all things, well, survival. Here you'll find features, interviews, and more dedicated to this popular genre, brought to you by Inflexion Games' upcoming open-world survival crafter, Nightingale.
