What's the gameplay of Telltale's Jurassic Park like? It's an adventure game where you solve basic puzzles by selecting highlighted hotspots on the screen, then perform quick time event-style button-presses to avoid the inevitably resulting dinosaur attacks. Read on for harrowing tales of getting eaten by dinosaurs.
The scene I played had a park employee and his daughter attempting to reach the visitors' center building to get medical attention for the Spanish-speaking woman in the trailer , who's apparently been spat on by a dilophosaurus (the ones that ate Dennis Nedry after he shut down the park's power in his attempt to escape with stolen dinosaur embryos). Their jeep is stopped by a young triceratops nibbling a chunk of plant in the road, and I have to figure out a way to move the beast back into its pen.
First: unjamming the gate door by checking the jeep glove compartment for an access code book and use that to open a nearby utility shed, where a lever (which you pull by holding a shoulder button and rotating a thumbstick) unjams the gate. Then honking the jeep's horn and flashing the lights scare the triceratops away from the food it's nibbling on, letting you toss it back into the pen.
One thing leads to another, and the pair of humans are caught in the middle of a battle between a massive alpha triceratops and the tyrannosaurus rex, which just happened to be passing by, hitting directional buttons on cue to evade snapping jaws, charging horns and swinging tails.
If QTE gameplay isn't appealing to you, think of it this way: It's kind of like a PG-13 version of Dead Space 2, where watching the results of failure are just as (or maybe more) rewarding than success. In the course of those events, I got my father-daughter team smashed in a jeep by the triceratops, eaten by the tyrannosaurus, flung high into the air and against a wall by the triceratops, stepped on by the T-rex, and finally the coup de gras: impaled by the triceratops and jammed into the tyrannosaurus' mouth like a morsel on a shishkebab skewer. (There's no blood, though, so it's ok.) All of that entertainment from simply not pushing any buttons!
When I played last night, it was set up on a PC with an Xbox controller plugged in - the UI was very Xbox-oriented, but I've been assured that there will be a mouse-and-keyboard UI in place when the game launches on PC this spring.
