Gamescom '11: Hands-off with Jurassic Park for iPad 2

Jurassic Park: The Game is quite a departure from previous Telltale games, despite what screenshots may show.

For one thing, there are no inventory puzzles, so you won’t be walking around each location in the four episodes looking for ways to USE stick ON stick holder.

Neither will you be technically walking about, as the short demonstration of the game in action (played on PC with Xbox controller) shown to me at Gamescom demonstrated.

Instead of letting you control your character directly, Telltale has taken a more LA Noire investigation/Myst-style approach to adventure gaming - giving it a very distinctive cinematic feel.

What the game does inherit from earlier Telltale titles, however, is its focus on plot and story – especially in regards to keeping things loyal to a much-loved franchise.

The action picks up from just after everyone’s favourite computer hacking Judas Dennis Nedry fails to make it to the boat with the can filled with dinosaur DNA. Naturally, the people he was delivering the ill-gotten gains to are rather keen on getting their hands on the prize, so they set out from the stormy boat landing to retrieve it.

Playing initially as two characters - the slimy business type and his guide, an ex-native of the island before it was bought by John Hammond - your task in episode one is to track down the canister, which handily has a homing beacon planted inside (just in case something ‘happened’ to poor old Dennis).

The game is a mixture of investigation/puzzle scenes and quick time events for the action moments (“Press up now! Keep hammering the button to break free from a dinosaur's jaws!”). I was shown one example of both sides of the game at Gamescom, with the initial investigation taking place at Dennis’s abandoned jeep.

Telltale has really done a good job at keeping the atmosphere consistent with the original film, with everything from the look of the dinosaurs to the sound distinctly Jurassic Park.

Fans will be chuffed to know, for instance, that all the noises the different creatures make are taken exactly from the film, while the stormy soundtrack and the freedom for the camera afforded by the new approach to the gameplay means it has a more film-like look than, say, Back to the Future.

Telltale has been scouring the plot and dialogue of the original film, too, so not only will there be familiar locations everyone will remember from the Spielberg classic but also places mentioned but never explored, such as the Jurassic Park roller-coaster.

The iOS version is designed solely for the iPad 2, which makes sense given how unstable Telltale’s iPad 1 releases have been to date.

While the PC and console games will be released in one big chunk on November 15th, the iPad 2 version needs to be completely altered in terms of controls this time around, so it’ll be coming out later in episodic form.

As a fan of the film, I came away from the demonstration with a lot more interest than when I went in.

The new mechanics seem far more suited to the touchscreen than the clumsy virtual joystick, while the increased emphasis on character and story over puzzles suits Telltale’s strengths if the Back to the Future series is anything to go by.

We’ll see if it has the right DNA for an enjoyable adventure game later in the year.