Theropods review

• Reviews by Will Aickman
• Published:

Dinosaur adventure is beautifully brought to life, though without much meat on the bone

Modern humans emerged on this planet around 65 million years after the last dinosaurs went extinct, which I personally have always considered an injustice. In any decent universe, Diplodocus would have stuck around long enough to give me a lift to work, and I’d have a few Troodon around to keep rodents off my back porch. “C’est la vie,” I tell myself, gazing wistfully after the pack of wild turkeys who roam my complex. I’m thinking about their ancestors, for whom I’d happily swap them without thinking twice. (I’m sure they’d never try to eat me.)

Thankfully, at least we now have Theropods, the debut adventure by Lost Token, which grants me a few precious hours to ignore the fossil record and fully embody my fantasy. Dinosaurs are just part of life for the human hunter-gatherer tribes who populate its gorgeous pixel world: families gather to pursue Parasaurolophus; barbarian kings don Triceratops skulls to strike fear in their enemies; parents teach their children to look both ways not for speeding cars but for hungry Spinosaurs. It’s a fun, fantastical world full of adventure and whimsy in equal measure, and though the terrible lizards are the main attractions, the story is a wonderfully human one. It’s just a shame that it’s over so quickly, and with such little challenge along the way.

The game opens as a carefree child playing in the jungle runs afoul of a terrifying Tyrannosaurus. Her mother and father, both tribal warriors, arrive in time to save her, but not without great cost. Years later, the girl has grown into the Amazon, a proud warrior of the tribe like her parents before her, entrusted with an heirloom spear by her chieftain father to lead a pack of hunters into the jungle. While the group is scouting, a great flash of light appears in the sky, and something comes plunging to Earth in pieces. One of these, a great glowing crystal, settles above her village, where it crackles with mysterious power.

The Amazon rushes home with the hunters to investigate, but she’s not the only one. A tribe of brutal barbarians has traced the crystal’s trajectory across the sky, and they arrive to subjugate all those who stand in the way of what they’re sure is a great treasure. Barely escaping with her life, the Amazon finds herself deep in the jungle with only her spear for protection. Much to her surprise, she discovers something the barbarians don’t know about: the crystal was the power source for a spaceship, whose occupant is desperate to repair it and return home. Joining forces, the Amazon and the Spaceman set out to brave the dinosaur-infested wilds to defeat the barbarians, retrieve the crystal, and return to the people they love.

Controls are simple as can be, with a single click to move or interact and a button press to open your inventory, where you can click items to adopt them as your cursor. You play as both the Amazon and the Spaceman; when they’re in the same place, you can swap between them by clicking whomever you aren’t controlling. That said, they often find themselves separated by circumstances and quirks of geography, so you’ll usually play as either one or the other for solid stretches of time. In a few sequences where they’re split up, you get to choose which character to join first; once you’ve finished their portion, you’ll swap over to the other to play theirs. (Aside from the order you play them in, these decisions don’t appear to have any impact on the story.)

The jungle is full of obstacles keeping you from your ultimate objective: there are rivers and lakes to cross; foliage to clear; and of course, many breeds of dinosaur calling the place home that you’ll have to move past without antagonizing. Most of the puzzles involve using your inventory in the environment or otherwise manipulating your surroundings to your characters’ advantage, but there are a few outliers as well. In an early sequence before the barbarians arrive, for instance, the Amazon plays a friendly game of hide-and-seek with some local children, and you’ll have to keep an eye out for signs of where they’re concealed so you can click to find them. Later, a raging fire forces you to figure out which parts of the Spaceman’s crashed ship do what in order to put it out.

One interesting feature is the ability to click on certain other characters to use them as a sort of inventory icon, replacing your cursor with their face so you can deploy them in the environment. Your most common accomplice in this regard is the Spaceman’s diminutive helper robot, which sports a number of useful attachments like a blowtorch and an environmental scanner. (There are also a few brief sequences where you control the robot directly, though never for longer than a single puzzle.) Hotspots tend to be infrequent, with only a few per screen; a quick keystroke highlights them for a moment if you get stuck.

Puzzles are plentiful, but the dearth of hotspots means you can solve most of them by process of elimination without having to figure out why the game wants you to do something. No matter how visually rich a screen is, odds are that if a single tree is one of three things you can click on, you’ll do it regardless of whether you know there’s fruit you need at the top. The robot, for instance, will just whip out whatever attachment is most useful in a given situation when you use it on a hotspot. All you need to do to progress, then, is to recognize that you can use the robot somewhere, rather than figuring out how or why. It feels less like solving a puzzle yourself than it does pressing a button to have the robot do it for you. This kind of design makes it easy to stumble onto crucial objects before you know you need them, with the natural instinct being to try them on the few other hotspots available without thinking of what your character must actually do.

Theropods

Genre:	Fantasy, Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Escape, Historical, Savior
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Pixel art
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

This would be fine, if not much of a challenge, were the puzzles simply easy to figure out, but the problem here is multifold. It’s rare to exclaim “How was I supposed to think of that?” about a puzzle you’ve solved handily, but it happened to me more than once while playing Theropods, with solutions sometimes bordering on nonsensical that I nonetheless quickly worked out thanks to my limited options. It leaves the gameplay feeling paradoxically easy and unintuitive at the same time, with success coming primarily through a lack of opportunities to fail.

That said, so much else in Theropods works fantastically well that you’d be remiss not to give it your full attention. The pixel art backgrounds are lush and bright, with a wide and varied color palette; it’s constantly deploying new color combinations to depict different facets of its many jungle and cliff scenes. Crucially for a tale about humans, aliens and dinosaurs coexisting, the game doesn’t let realism get in the way of what’s fun and nice to look at. The dinos are all brightly colored and designed to be memorable, with unique and interesting sprites for each species that don’t let anatomical accuracy get in the way of a good visual: a hungry flock of Compsognathus sports all the colors of the rainbow, and the Tyrannosaurus that haunts the Amazon’s memories has a great shaggy mane of auburn hair.

Though the character models seem minimalist at first glance, they prove remarkably dynamic and capable of expression, and nearly every action the protagonists can take is accompanied by complex, fluid, and unique animation. Within the first ten minutes of spear-twirling, tree-climbing, and dino-chasing, I understood completely why development took close to a decade. Crucially, the dinosaurs and other prehistoric critters are brought to life with the same level of detail and care, from the grazing sauropods who pop up on the opening menu, to a nest full of hungry pterosaur babies, to the truly frightening Spinosaurus that pursues the Spaceman during a tense underwater sequence. There’s also a rather shocking amount of detailed cartoon gore, including severed human limbs, torn-open dino carcasses, and a whole puzzle centered on toting organs around. It’s appropriate to the material, but could make it more difficult to play with the children who might otherwise love it.

By comparison the cutscenes feel more rudimentary, trading expressiveness and range of motion for close-ups on the characters. Contrasted against the wonderfully varied in-engine animation, movement in cinematics has a paper-doll quality to it, as if somebody was manipulating cutouts of the characters against a diorama. You’ll get the gist of what’s happening, but it’s more functional than fun to watch. Cutscenes are usually brief, though, with just a few quick shots for context before returning you to the action.

Each protagonist sports a unique and immediately recognizable design, filled with personality and easy to identify even if you haven’t seen them for a while. You can tell a great deal about the Amazon’s forthright, adventurous spirit from her posture and the way she moves. Her flame-orange hair gives her an instantly iconic look, and her voice is gentle and full of humor. The Spaceman, though masked in a cybernetic suit for much of the game, manages to be charismatic and expressive despite usually speaking through a buzzing voice modulator. Even the little robot, whose floating, ball-like model and beeping vocalizations are as limited as they come, has a great deal of character packed into its diminutive frame. Minor characters, like the many denizens of the Amazon’s village, are portrayed like real people whose lives keep going even when you’re not there to see it.

The distinctive character designs prove especially crucial in light of the game’s unique approach to voice acting. Theropods has been marketed as a dialogue-free experience, which both is and isn’t entirely true. Though the characters do speak, they communicate in a musical sort of nonsense-language, presumably meant to evoke a time before any current tongue had developed. There are neither subtitles nor any other visual aid for what they’re saying, leaving you to parse the tenor of what you’re hearing by context, tone, and body language.

It surprised me how well this works; I never had any trouble following the story or figuring out what someone wanted me to do when we spoke, and the game’s more emotional moments remain just as effective without knowing for sure what anyone is saying. The entire voice cast deserves particular recognition for imbuing each incomprehensible line with feeling, personality, and meaning that transcends language. (Extra points to the developers for going the extra mile and compressing the dialogue audio to match the retro era they’ve taken such pains to evoke visually, a detail that other such titles often overlook.)

Naturally, the lack of understandable speech places an extra burden on the rest of the sound design to communicate what you need to know, but Theropods rises ably to the challenge. The crackling of flames, the rushing of a river, and all the beeps and bloops of the Spaceman’s equipment are well-implemented and evocative. The real draw, of course, is the bellowing, screeching and chirping of the beasts you’ll encounter. From the hissing of a giant serpent, to the squawking of tiny scavengers, to the wicked T-Rex’s bellowing roar, the critters you encounter all communicate with as much character as the human (and alien) cast. A bouncy MIDI-style soundtrack accompanies it all, full of percussive beats and whistling synth-pipes that call to mind the kind of instruments Paleolithic musicians might have made for themselves.

All these factors come together to make the game world a pleasure to experience. I could have happily spent hours simply taking in the scenery and the soundscape. Unfortunately, I’d barely had time to get comfortable when I realized I was approaching the home stretch, having taken less than three hours to get from start to finish. Theropods certainly doesn’t feel incomplete—it tells a full story in the time it has, with satisfying emotional arcs for all involved—but it doesn’t entirely feel like everything it could have been, either.

The world is so full of life and potential that once I’d finished I could hardly believe there was no more to do there. Surely, I felt, a setting like this could accommodate a journey with more steps, more dramatic encounters with beasts from prehistory, more clever glimpses into how humans and dinosaurs might have coexisted! The moment passed, of course, as I reflected on how unrealistic that would be for an independent three-person team, who clearly took the time necessary to make sure this game looks and feels as good as it does. All the same, there’s so much gesturing toward a larger world in what turns out to be a compact package that it’s hard to reach the end credits without feeling you were just getting started.

Final Verdict

Still, I came away from Theropods feeling good about the experience. The game seems not just alive but excited to be so, as if each screen can scarcely contain its enthusiasm to show off what it has to offer. While the puzzles aren’t much of a draw on their own, the game world is beautiful to explore and a pleasure to inhabit, full of wonderful sights, sounds, set pieces and characters I came to love without ever understanding a word they said. There’s no doubt that the setting and cast could, in theory, have supported a longer and more expansive game—and it’s hard not to wish that economic and developmental limitations would have allowed that to materialize—but as it stands, Theropods is a fun and often exciting way to spend a couple of hours, and will likely stick with you much longer.

Will played Theropods on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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