You can count the number of decent Jurassic Park video games on a single hand. It's tragic. Fans haven't given up on the dream, though, and a modder going by the name conceptcrash has been slowly building and realizing his prehistoric dream with Jurassic Park: Aftermath. It's been in development for years, looks absolutely gorgeous, and I want to play it immediately.
Jurassick Park: Aftermath was only supposed to take conceptcrash a few weeks, an exercise to learn more about CryEngine. Several years later, he's still plugging away at his passion project.
Here's what conceptcrash was showing off way back in March 2013:
It wouldn't be shocking to learn he'd given up at some point. That's what seems to happen all the time. A couple of interesting screen shots pop up on Reddit or somewhere else, interest spikes, but it's eventually lost to the ages. Jurassic Park: Aftermath remains alive in early 2015.
Here's proof:
There are ton of other gorgeous looks at the game in this Imgur album.
As Kirk has pointed out, we've waited for a (new) good Jurassic Park game for way too long.
The scope of Jurassic Park: Aftermath has always remained pretty small, though it's changed a bit as time has gone on. Basically, conceptcrash wants a way to walk around Jurassic Park:
"The map is not a full game,it's a chunk of environment that will eventually be released to explore.Some elements are interactive and some basic game mechanics have been added recently. It's not intended as a shooting type game more exploration and horror,recently I've been working on adding some elements to make it have more of that tone."
There are some roaming dinosaurs that can attack you, so it's not simply an interactive painting.
Right around the time Jurassic World's first teaser dropped, conceptcrash released a slice of footage of Jurassic Park: Aftermath set to the chilling piano cover that's part of the new film.
You (like me) can continue to follow the game's progress on IndieDB. I'm not sure I've ever wanted a fan project to succeed as much as this one. It honestly looks like a dream come true.
Unfortunately, Jurassic Park: Aftermath doesn't have a release date just yet. Fingers crossed!
You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.