Earlier this month, I finished a months-long, epic playthrough of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and was wondering what to play next. Then I noticed that I had a "free" game still lurking in my library, one given away at no charge by Epic Games for promotional purposes. It had been there all but ignored for months, but I finally noticed it and decided to give it a spin.
It's a Jurassic Park game, Jurassic Park Evolution to be precise, and I was looking forward to romping through the jungle, driving a safari jeep as dinosaurs chased after me. I looked forward to playing as one of the children hiding in the kitchen from marauding raptors. I looked forward to shooting Jeff Goldblum in the face.
Turns out the game featured none of that. It's not a role-playing game or even a first-, second-, or third-person shooter. It's more like a Sims game - you design and build a dinosaur-themed amusement park. Everything's observed from about a 100-foot level as you install a power plant, run electric lines to a DNA incubator lab, and release various dinos into a fenced-in pen. You then have to add fast-food joints, restrooms, and gift shops for the tourists, as well as set up research facilities and security details. The only real "excitement" in the game is when you overcrowd a dino pen and one breaks out, and you gave to dispatch a helicopter to shoot it with a tranq dart.
Not at all what I was expecting and rather disappointing to say the least - I wasn't looking for lessons in park design and management, I wanted to tango with some ferocious dinosaurs. I wanted to rescue Laura Dern. But the funny thing was that there's something compelling about game play and whenever I started the game, I'd wind up going at it for hours and hours on end. It was hard to motivate myself to start the game up on any given day, but it was even harder to stop playing once I started. There was always three or four things that needed to be done - feed the dinos in Pen 1, finish spawning a new trike in Incubator 2, repairing a broken fence in Pen 3. Even though there were no characters or personalities to react to, other than some occasional voice-over narration from cast members of the movies (including Jeff Goldblum), the sheer amount of busy work needed to keep the park up, operating, and profitable kept me going.
Until one day it just no longer seemed worth the bother. I did manage to get in some 64 or so hours of gameplay before I threw in the towel and found myself back at the drawing board wondering what to play next.
That's when Epic released another freebie, a game I had never heard of called Control. It looked like it was well designed and developed, so I figured I'd give it a shot. What did I have to lose? It was a free game.
It turns out it was a highly enjoyable, although challenging, paranormal shooter game. The whole game takes place inside of one massive office complex, made even more massive because of paranormal space/dimension shifts that allow a broom closet to open into a stadium-size arena. There were lots of challenging puzzles to solve on how to navigate around the complex, and constant swarms of enemies shooting at you from all directions. I "died" in game a lot. But no worries, you just re-spawn again nearby as if nothing happened and resume shooting back at the enemies.
It was one of the more original games I've played, both in terms of visual design and style, actual gameplay, and story line and characters. I literally had no idea what to expect next at many points in the game. The office complex is a brilliant example of brutalist architecture, and the game makes excellent use of ray tracing light effects.
I don't want to give anything away with spoilers, but I'm not sure I can give a coherent recap of the plot, anyway. You play as Jesse, a young woman with a mysterious past searching the agency for your lost brother. I finally "beat" the game after some 39 hours, but gameplay was so challenging and intense, I had little motive to start over and play through again. Maybe someday, but not just . . . now. But anyway, I do recommend Control, especially if you're becoming burned out on massive, open-world marathons, or shooting space aliens with laser guns, or being a Viking rampaging across the English countryside.
So now, I'm back at that same drawing board wondering what to play next. And then, lo and behold, Steam just announced the start of their Summer Sale, so I suddenly have lots of new options. What to choose next?
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