Theropods Demo
Theropods is a prehistoric point-and-click adventure free of dialogue.
Theropods. Credit: Lost Token / Dionous Games
Theropods is a point-and-click adventure game from Lost Token and publisher Dionous Games. The protagonist is a cavewoman, daughter of a tribal chief who lost her mother at a young age and has now inherited her spear. The game’s demo lets you get to know the young hunter, experience a handful of puzzles, and see what makes this adventure a little different from the usual.
There’s no dialogue or text in Theropods. We don’t understand the cavepeople’s language and must gain meaning from how they gesture or vocalize. I’m a little ambivalent about this approach, because while the game has some good animation, I don’t think it’s good enough to carry the full runtime without dialogue. With so many situations where characters are obviously supposed to communicate, the way the game does it comes off a little boring. To cite a recent example, I think Primal Planet did a far better job with conveying drama despite the lack of dialogue, in the context of cavemen. I will give the game a chance on full release—I hope I’m wrong.
Theropods. Credit: Lost Token / Dionous Games
Theropods features some great, expressive pixel art. It’s chunky, like classic adventure games, and reminds me of some of the best from the late EGA and early VGA eras. Unfortunately, it suffers from a common problem of those classic games: pixel hunting. Interactive objects aren’t always clear, particularly with the low resolution of the art. For example, there’s a puzzle that relies on using tree sap, but that tree sap wasn’t clear to me on the screen, and I found it accidentally by seeing where my pointer would light up. A hotspot highlighting feature would help immensely here.
While my feelings about this demo are mixed, I do think Theropods shows some promise, and I will be playing the full game on release.
Theropods is slated for a Q4 release on Steam. A demo is available.
Played on: Steam Deck
