Theropods (PC)
The point-and-click adventure game Theropods takes place on a Stone Age world where dinosaurs still walk alongside humans, and that’s not just a detail of the setting. More than anything else in this adventure, interacting with, defeating, or manipulating the wildlife will be key to survival and progress, and all of this is complicated by an inciting incident where a spacefarer crash lands on this world, adding all new elements to the ways you utilize the natural world to your advantage or must overcome its dangers.
Theropods is primarily the story of a huntress, this point-and-click opting for an entirely wordless story that fits its primitive world even if it wouldn’t have hurt to have a few words actually show up in menus. The commitment lasts for everything but the game’s title and credits though, but this doesn’t hold the story back too much. When the spacefarer crash lands on the world of dinosaurs and men, their vessel ejects a powerful energy crystal that disrupts the tribal relations of the land. The huntress, fleeing the attack of an enemy tribe, ends up meeting the spacefarer, the two realizing they can work together as the astronaut needs the power source to return home while the tribeswoman wants to free her people from the conquering barbarians. The two leads do each have a bit of an extra layer to their identity beyond what they represent in the technologically opposed alliance they drum up. The huntress was traumatized by a Tyrannosaurus Rex attack in her youth while the spacefarer wants to get back to their family and newborn child, the narrative finding ways to make some decent use of these aspects without having to lean on any dialogue. More detailed scenes than the game’s already fairly strong pixel art will show moments where the huntress hesitates due to those childhood fears or the spacefarer struggles as they shed more and more of their highly advanced tech for a hope of getting home, some nice emotion coming through even though it’s not a complicated plot with more to say.
Theropods takes place across a good deal of detailed and sometimes lovely environments, the prehistoric world having many appealing natural scenes even if its human characters are simplified outside of the cutscenes. With the game not likely to take you over 3 hours to beat, it feels like a lot of the care was put into making the different areas you end up in look great, although the pixel art can sometimes get in the way of an inventory puzzle or two where you can’t quite make out what an object is until you’ve picked it up and it’s portrayed in more detail in your bag. However, while you will be scrounging up objects to overcome obstacles, the game leaning a little heavily on your spear and vines as common tools, it’s the living creatures that tend to give each area their interesting considerations. Some of these are a bit more straightforward, some meat-eating beast blocks a path and you need to connive a way around it, but other points see the player needing to get more creative about how to outfox a wild animal.
At one point you need bamboo for a raft but you don’t have anything strong enough to break down the plant, but a nearby Triceratops could surely help if you could figure out a way to manipulate it into breaking down some stalks. The astronaut finds themselves underwater where a Spinosaurus won’t let them resurface safely, but despite having little else on hand, some jellyfish, a clam, and an isopod are all treated as tools you can use to figure out a way to overcome it. It not only literally adds life to the puzzle solving but makes for moments more interesting than simply using a tool on an object, figuring out something as simple as how you can get your hands on a hermit crab’s shell more engaging when the creature is reactive and not just something you click on with the right item to continue.
The spacefarer’s science fiction gizmos and elements are admittedly a smaller part of the adventure despite the main conflict revolving around their fuel source, but it feels appropriate as they only arrive with a certain amount they can use that dwindles over time. A little floating robot proves to be a good tool, acting like an extra pair of hands with extra functions like a torch, and your introduction to the astronaut after their crash also leans a lot more on figuring out a device compared to later moments where it will shift back towards the natural world. Theropods isn’t exclusively about manipulating or defeating wildlife of course, especially when the rival tribe comes into the picture more even though you’re often goading them like you would an animal at times too. The puzzle variety keeps it from feeling too similar despite the common theme of turning the tables on hostile wildlife or using it to your advantage, but there are moments that are a bit less clever.
Theropods keeps its locations limited in scope usually to your advantage, allowing you to start eliminating possibilities and figure out what should be done to succeed. At times though, you’ll have so few available actions you might trigger a solution without really thinking about it, process of elimination sometimes the stronger method than considering your actions. Theropods will pull back at parts and give you a few screens to navigate or more than just the necessary actions available, and if you do get stuck you can always press Tab and reveal interactive elements if you do need the nudge for one reason or another. This helps with those moments where an important object doesn’t stand out well, and while there are a few time sensitive interactions, you can never fail and can trigger the window of opportunity again if you don’t realize what needs to be done in time.
Being short by design does benefit Theropods’s wordless story-telling and the game avoids having too many moments where it feels like you’re in a new puzzle-solving situation just to pad out the runtime, but it does mean there’s little reason to come back to it after a single go through. Theropods has a few moments where you get to pick between the huntress or spacefarer as they’re split up, but these seem to be just picking a preference on whose section to see first with the outcome not tied to who acts first. You can swap between them when they work together which enhances the range of options in those puzzles, but puzzle solutions are pretty inflexible and there are no secrets to motivate you to dig deeper. Only two Steam achievements relate to optional activities, but for a concise adventure it moves at a good enough pace that its brevity doesn’t feel like it hampered the intended experience in any way.
THE VERDICT: Theropods’s short runtime suits its wordless narrative that guides a primitive huntress and advanced spacefarer to some interesting puzzle-solving situations. The frequent focus on needing to manipulate or overcome the dinosaurs and other living things on the game’s primal planet adds an intriguing layer to interactions, invoking the right reactions from something often the key rather than just using an item on the right object to succeed. The usually strong environmental pixel art can lead to a few moments where you can’t make out something important, but guard rails are in place to help you find your way forward even if it means a few puzzles can almost solve themselves as you’re just feeling your way through a new space.
And so, I give Theropods for PC…
A GOOD rating. Rather bloody at times to the point some organs are used as puzzle solving tools, Theropods leans on that idea of natural puzzle-solving pretty often with the visitor from outer space able to bring a few more options besides a spear to the table to expand the range of tools a tad. Generally, it is that focus on using things in the environment to overcome the environment that can lead to a few moments where you immediately solve a problem because your options aren’t wide enough that it would require any thought, but there are enough involved ones to spice things up and make you consider intriguing variables like how a creature will behave in response to your actions. The characters not speaking in any recognizable language means a lot of the interactive elements will involve experimentation or logic that can’t be too advanced, the game really only having one moment involving the crashed ship’s controls where you need to figure out a puzzle’s rules rather than just considering the way the natural world can be used to your advantage. Theropods keeps up the dinosaur and setting variety during the mismatched duo’s quest which works well to hold your interest between the little story moments that give our protagonists a bit of personality and motivation, and it ends up the kind of journey where the short length being a negative is mostly because you would like to see another dinosaur-based puzzle since the game crafts them well. It’s not swinging for the fences with complex puzzles nor does it ever really have the room to make ones with baffling solutions since it is a tightly told tale, but Theropods could have probably got away with adding a few more parts to its puzzles to make some of the interesting moments like a T-Rex encounter more involved and robust.
While it was wise that Theropods explores other ideas than always having its focus on dinosaur-based puzzle solving, the setting being embraced so regularly gives this point-and-click the appeal you’d expect from its premise. The science-fiction side could maybe use a stronger presence, it not too hard to see a version of Theropods that didn’t even include the spacefarer since they don’t lean on particularly outlandish tech, but having the second protagonist does give a helpful second layer so it’s not too simple of a story. Its emphasis on wordless story-telling may have kept its scope small, but its imagination shows in how it realized the idea of a prehistoric point-and-click.