Theropods

Dinosaurs are cool again: we have just received a new movie filled with beasts eating residents of an American suburb in The End of Oak Street, but if you are looking for a more prehistoric story, Theropods is the game for you. In development for over ten years, by a team of just three people at Lost Token, this point and click adventure game finally releases today, August 20, on Steam, and you can see the passion the team poured into this game in every pixel.

Theropods is set in prehistoric times, but just like many B-movies and pulp stories, humans and dinosaurs coexist. You play as a redheaded huntress who lives in a lovely village that is attacked by a bloodthirsty tribe after the fall of a meteorite. In parallel, a space man, also playable, crashes in this hostile world filled with dinosaurs and dangers. Both characters form a partnership to rescue the villagers and defeat the evil invaders, while the astronaut looks for a way home, and the entire story develops without any dialogue.

In fact, there is no text at all in the entire game: everything is told in a visual way, so all puzzles use logic and intuition (and when that fails, trial and error) without the need of long dialogue boxes and trees. Like in old school point and click games, gameplay consists of collecting objects and using them, directly or in combination with others, to solve every situation. The gameplay is very simple: you rarely have more than three or four objects at the same time in your inventory, and puzzles are almost always contained to just one screen, so their is no back-tracking, and there is only one way to interact with each possible thing. As for what that is, we're talking about clicking on it and if you guessed the object right, the character will know what to do.

If you feel lost, you can press H to reveal every point you can interact with on the map to avoid pixel hunting (those things you can interact with aren't always easy to find in the pixel art of the game) and try everything until you find the solution. And despite the prehistoric location and the fact characters are almost constantly being chased or attacked by Tyrannosaurus, Pteranodon, Triceratops, Velociraptors, or Spinosaurus, there are no elements of survival and no fail states.

Therefore, Theropods is quite an easy game and it's rare to get blocked for long because there aren't many combinations, although sometimes the solutions are not the most intuitive they can be (which is also part of the fun and charm, seeing the creative ways the characters find to escape from every scenario).

The fact the game's main creators, Kostas Skiftas and Sarah Duffield-Harding, come from the animation background and not game design, explains why gameplay wise it's simple and easy. More experienced gamers will not find much of a challenge here, and the story can be finished in two or three hours, but that doesn't mean that the game is not enjoyable. That's not the case at all. It's simply more relaxed, which is also a good thing (and there are still many puzzles in which you will have to think "outside the box" to solve it).

It's very satisfying, and sometimes quite funny, to see how the characters survive in very dangerous and dramatic situations, but it's in the pixel art and hand-made animation where the true beauty of the game lies. Characters are extra expressive to communicate everything without words (although they do make cute sounds), there is a large variety of scenarios, smoke and water effects, and of course, almost every scene has a beautiful dinosaur or creature of some kind (my favourite, without a doubt, is in the underwater scene), and some music themes are also quite catchy.

The story is very charming, as more information about the astronaut is revealed and the relationship with the huntress develops. Don't expect many twists: it's the action (or the puzzles) that pushes the story forward, but there are still some shocking moments, and when the story ends, you will end the journey with a smile on your face.

Theropods was well worth the ten-year development cycle, because, while it's not a very challenging, complex, or long point and click, it clearly is a game made with passion and is well worthy of being proud of. Its greatest achievements lies more in the animation and graphics than in its gameplay, but it's hugely enjoyable from start to finish, like picking up a light comic with a predictable but satisfying story with captivating art, one that will leave you a lovely memory and which may want to experience again in the future.