Trespasser is a PC game released in 1998. Set one year after the events of the 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park and published alongside the film's home video release. The player assumes the role of Anne, the sole survivor of a plane crash on InGen's Jurassic Park "Site B" on Isla Nublar. With a fractured arm and no equipment to speak of, Anne must escape the remote island by solving puzzles and evading dangerous dinosaurs.
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First off, you will need to apply the trespasser CE patch to get this working on modern operating systems. You can get it at trescom.org, which is a dedicated fan site for this game.
This is a unique and flawed game. The shooting is awkward, I had plenty of moments where my gun was practically in the mouth of a dinosaur and missed my shot. There are puzzles that are simply confusing and will require a lookup.
However, the physics system is a joy to play with and you'll get many chances to mess with it. The shooting system was forward looking being similar to what VR controls are today. The much-lampooned health bar on the avatar's boobs through way of a heart tattoo is actually a cool way to avoid Hud UI clogging the players screen even if you'll usually die in one hit anyway but it's really immersive. That's the way I would sum this game up, Immersive. It feels like a low poly island vacation with dinosaurs that need shooting and a story to uncover. I really enjoyed my time with this one and honestly, might give it a replay. Maybe it's not a "good" game but it entertained me more than a lot of conventionally good games have and that' has to be worth something.
TLDR: Play this game, it's worth your time.
This is a unique and flawed game. The shooting is awkward, I had plenty of moments where my gun was practically in the mouth of a dinosaur and missed my shot. There are puzzles that are simply confusing and will require a lookup.
However, the physics system is a joy to play with and you'll get many chances to mess with it. The shooting system was forward looking being similar to what VR controls are today. The much-lampooned health bar on the avatar's boobs through way of a heart tattoo is actually a cool way to avoid Hud UI clogging the players screen even if you'll usually die in one hit anyway but it's really immersive. That's the way I would sum this game up, Immersive. It feels like a low poly island vacation with dinosaurs that need shooting and a story to uncover. I really enjoyed my time with this one and honestly, might give it a replay. Maybe it's not a "good" game but it entertained me more than a lot of conventionally good games have and that' has to be worth something.
TLDR: Play this game, it's worth your time.
look down for boobs
I've returned to this game a bunch of times over the years since I got it in '99 or whatever, and I've always considered it oddly compelling despite its many, many problems. This time, though, I think I've finally been cured of that. It is and always has been utter trash.
If you're not familiar with this thing, it was meant to be a kind of prestige Jurassic Park version of HALF-LIFE - a totally immersive unbroken first-person journey through the abandoned ruins of that second island from The Lost World. But rather than employing traditional FPS mechanics to fulfill that assignment, the vision for the gameplay was complete interactivity with the environment using realistic real-time physics. Of course, that's something that we totally take for granted now, but it was more or less unheard of at the time of this game's development, and wouldn't really be a mainstream thing until HALF-LIFE 2 six years later. But before you get too excited, understand how they implemented it - to interact with the world of the game, you directly control your character's fully modeled right arm in its full range of motion. Like, you hold left mouse to extend the arm and then move the mouse to wave it around and do shit. You gotta aim your arm to pick things up or open doors. There's no way to explain how clumsy this is without you seeing or playing it yourself. Imagine controlling HALF-LIFE: ALYX with a mouse.
So, that's the gameplay, that's how it works. Hard to wrap your mind around, but could probably be interesting or even fun if the game was well made! Well, guess what. This thing is so busted and unfinished it legitimately should not have been released. The physics are comically bad and all mandatory puzzles involving them will have you going insane trying to do the simplest things. Stacking three boxes to jump up onto something will take you tens of minutes. Keycards you need will fall through the world as you bash your hand against against a door frame trying to walk through it. Objects weighing hundreds of pounds will slide around frictionlessly against each other and slip out from under you like a watermelon seed as you walk on them. Oh, and you do actually get firearms and have to shoot dinosaurs quite regularly, but the guns are ......... are you ready for this? ......... also fully modeled physics objects. You have to pick them up manually with your arm, aim your arm in the direction of the Raptor about to kill you, and try to line up the iron sights to take a shot. Meanwhile, the dinosaur has run headlong into the end of your gun and your stupid noodle arm has folded up like a crinkly straw and you automatically dropped the gun on the ground and have to fumble around to try to pick it back up. Sound fun?
But okay, okay. Maybe the main gameplay conceit is somewhat hare-brained in the first place. And maybe the underlying physics engine is absolutely disastrous. It could be worth toughing that stuff out for an interesting, well-constructed adventure, right? RIGHT????
Well, yeah. But unfortunately, everything else about the game sucks too. Gameplay is literally 75% walking, as slow as you can POSSIBLY IMAGINE, through miles and miles of basically featureless jungle. The levels feel almost randomly assembled, and even in more densely and purposefully built areas, like ones with a bunch of buildings, the amount of space between objectives that you have to run back and forth between is sadistic. The dinosaurs sport genuinely hilarous AI and behaviors, and will sometimes do wacky things like die standing up, get stuck half inside objects, or accidentally skate down slopes at a million miles per hour like they're playing TRIBES. They're never scary, you can usually just avoid them by getting them stuck on the geometry, and they're always outside, making all indoor sections tensionless - presumably because trying to put one in a building would break the physics to such a degree that your computer would China Syndrome itself.
No real design skill or interesting storytelling going on - you're just solving the most basic physics puzzles, or key hunting, or following some light environmental clues to know where to go. The sum total of the story is just this lady who crashed in a plane trying to get off the island while snippets from John Hammond's fictional autobiography narrate things occasionally. Really just not much going on.
In spite of everything, you might enjoy some eerie moments slowly poking around in abandoned buildings, piecing together some little bits of enviromental storytelling, etc. It's there if you're that kind of person. I am! I love exploring weird horror or horror-adjacent stuff in first person, and I think that's why I've been giving this thing a chance since my teens. But good lord almighty, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It is at best a plodding, impossibly janky FPS, and at worst a JP-themed tech demo that does not function and should not have been commercially released. If you can believe it, there's a ton of quite interesting history about this game's development and the pre-release hype touting how revolutionary it was going to be. (Some real Molyneux levels of BS, go check it out sometime.) And yeah, that's fine. That's valid. I do believe that ambition and vision count for something, and I do understand that a game this bad can be made with good intentions. But at the end of the day, that doesn't make it not suck!
Anyway, everyone should really play this stupid game, or at least skip through a longplay of it. Hopefully I have now ragequit for the last time, and writing this has exorcised the demons. But it's probably just as likely that I'll load my save again tomorrow. Sigh.
If you're not familiar with this thing, it was meant to be a kind of prestige Jurassic Park version of HALF-LIFE - a totally immersive unbroken first-person journey through the abandoned ruins of that second island from The Lost World. But rather than employing traditional FPS mechanics to fulfill that assignment, the vision for the gameplay was complete interactivity with the environment using realistic real-time physics. Of course, that's something that we totally take for granted now, but it was more or less unheard of at the time of this game's development, and wouldn't really be a mainstream thing until HALF-LIFE 2 six years later. But before you get too excited, understand how they implemented it - to interact with the world of the game, you directly control your character's fully modeled right arm in its full range of motion. Like, you hold left mouse to extend the arm and then move the mouse to wave it around and do shit. You gotta aim your arm to pick things up or open doors. There's no way to explain how clumsy this is without you seeing or playing it yourself. Imagine controlling HALF-LIFE: ALYX with a mouse.
So, that's the gameplay, that's how it works. Hard to wrap your mind around, but could probably be interesting or even fun if the game was well made! Well, guess what. This thing is so busted and unfinished it legitimately should not have been released. The physics are comically bad and all mandatory puzzles involving them will have you going insane trying to do the simplest things. Stacking three boxes to jump up onto something will take you tens of minutes. Keycards you need will fall through the world as you bash your hand against against a door frame trying to walk through it. Objects weighing hundreds of pounds will slide around frictionlessly against each other and slip out from under you like a watermelon seed as you walk on them. Oh, and you do actually get firearms and have to shoot dinosaurs quite regularly, but the guns are ......... are you ready for this? ......... also fully modeled physics objects. You have to pick them up manually with your arm, aim your arm in the direction of the Raptor about to kill you, and try to line up the iron sights to take a shot. Meanwhile, the dinosaur has run headlong into the end of your gun and your stupid noodle arm has folded up like a crinkly straw and you automatically dropped the gun on the ground and have to fumble around to try to pick it back up. Sound fun?
But okay, okay. Maybe the main gameplay conceit is somewhat hare-brained in the first place. And maybe the underlying physics engine is absolutely disastrous. It could be worth toughing that stuff out for an interesting, well-constructed adventure, right? RIGHT????
Well, yeah. But unfortunately, everything else about the game sucks too. Gameplay is literally 75% walking, as slow as you can POSSIBLY IMAGINE, through miles and miles of basically featureless jungle. The levels feel almost randomly assembled, and even in more densely and purposefully built areas, like ones with a bunch of buildings, the amount of space between objectives that you have to run back and forth between is sadistic. The dinosaurs sport genuinely hilarous AI and behaviors, and will sometimes do wacky things like die standing up, get stuck half inside objects, or accidentally skate down slopes at a million miles per hour like they're playing TRIBES. They're never scary, you can usually just avoid them by getting them stuck on the geometry, and they're always outside, making all indoor sections tensionless - presumably because trying to put one in a building would break the physics to such a degree that your computer would China Syndrome itself.
No real design skill or interesting storytelling going on - you're just solving the most basic physics puzzles, or key hunting, or following some light environmental clues to know where to go. The sum total of the story is just this lady who crashed in a plane trying to get off the island while snippets from John Hammond's fictional autobiography narrate things occasionally. Really just not much going on.
In spite of everything, you might enjoy some eerie moments slowly poking around in abandoned buildings, piecing together some little bits of enviromental storytelling, etc. It's there if you're that kind of person. I am! I love exploring weird horror or horror-adjacent stuff in first person, and I think that's why I've been giving this thing a chance since my teens. But good lord almighty, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It is at best a plodding, impossibly janky FPS, and at worst a JP-themed tech demo that does not function and should not have been commercially released. If you can believe it, there's a ton of quite interesting history about this game's development and the pre-release hype touting how revolutionary it was going to be. (Some real Molyneux levels of BS, go check it out sometime.) And yeah, that's fine. That's valid. I do believe that ambition and vision count for something, and I do understand that a game this bad can be made with good intentions. But at the end of the day, that doesn't make it not suck!
Anyway, everyone should really play this stupid game, or at least skip through a longplay of it. Hopefully I have now ragequit for the last time, and writing this has exorcised the demons. But it's probably just as likely that I'll load my save again tomorrow. Sigh.
Trespasser is a fascinating oddity. Ultimately, I have a lot of respect for its ambition, even if its execution leaves a lot to be desired. Even to this day, there isn't all that much quite like Trespasser, and there are definitely reasons for that.
It's controls are pretty sluggish, which isn't inherently a bad thing. Your floppy noodle arm makes it trickier to line up shots, which makes charging dinos a lot more threatening than they would be with a standard "crosshair at the center of the screen" sort of aiming. There's a certain tactility to the shooting in Trespasser that really is only rivaled by VR shooters.
The level design aims for realism, often at the expense of fun, and even then some of its levels feels incredibly goofy. The huge map is certainly reflective of an actual island's size, but with your slow walking speed it becomes quite a chore to traverse. That isn't to say that the realism doesn't have its benefits, but the game's systems make those harder to appreciate.
The game's puzzles are baffling at times. None of them are especially difficult, and often it feels like they are less puzzles and more a demonstration of the game's novel physics engine. This is best epitomized by a puzzle at the end of the game with a lever that raises an elevator. You can't press that lever while on the elevator, but there is a really convenient plank of wood waiting to be shot over onto the button. It feels incredibly gamey, like the designer's hand is guiding you to its solution in a way that clashes with the game's aspirations for a realistic, seamless world. This applies to pretty much every puzzle in the game.
Trespasser is a game pulled both in a very gamey and realistic direction in a way that led to a tonally odd game. Nonetheless, no game from the time really tried many of the things Trespasser did, and in that regard it died a pioneers death. This game has physics puzzles that weren't ideal, but it was doing them years before Half Life 2. It has realistic jungles years before Crysis. It achieved a hudless UI, in an admittedly pretty tacky and infamous way. One could easily criticize those aspects of the game, but I also feel it earns a lot of grace purely for the size of its ambition. It's actually an incredibly fascinating time to play, and while I can't really call it a "great" game in the way I might something like Rain World, that shouldn't diminish the value of this game, nor should it even necessarily dissuade anyone else from giving it a try.
It's controls are pretty sluggish, which isn't inherently a bad thing. Your floppy noodle arm makes it trickier to line up shots, which makes charging dinos a lot more threatening than they would be with a standard "crosshair at the center of the screen" sort of aiming. There's a certain tactility to the shooting in Trespasser that really is only rivaled by VR shooters.
The level design aims for realism, often at the expense of fun, and even then some of its levels feels incredibly goofy. The huge map is certainly reflective of an actual island's size, but with your slow walking speed it becomes quite a chore to traverse. That isn't to say that the realism doesn't have its benefits, but the game's systems make those harder to appreciate.
The game's puzzles are baffling at times. None of them are especially difficult, and often it feels like they are less puzzles and more a demonstration of the game's novel physics engine. This is best epitomized by a puzzle at the end of the game with a lever that raises an elevator. You can't press that lever while on the elevator, but there is a really convenient plank of wood waiting to be shot over onto the button. It feels incredibly gamey, like the designer's hand is guiding you to its solution in a way that clashes with the game's aspirations for a realistic, seamless world. This applies to pretty much every puzzle in the game.
Trespasser is a game pulled both in a very gamey and realistic direction in a way that led to a tonally odd game. Nonetheless, no game from the time really tried many of the things Trespasser did, and in that regard it died a pioneers death. This game has physics puzzles that weren't ideal, but it was doing them years before Half Life 2. It has realistic jungles years before Crysis. It achieved a hudless UI, in an admittedly pretty tacky and infamous way. One could easily criticize those aspects of the game, but I also feel it earns a lot of grace purely for the size of its ambition. It's actually an incredibly fascinating time to play, and while I can't really call it a "great" game in the way I might something like Rain World, that shouldn't diminish the value of this game, nor should it even necessarily dissuade anyone else from giving it a try.
pra mim jogo clunky ambicioso é uma delícia. e esse jogo era tão ambicioso que quando eles notaram que não tinha chance alguma disso rodar bem em pcs da época eles tiveram que repicar o jogo aonde dava. isso leva a umas peculiaridades visuais interessantes como as constantes aparições das árvores que não estão grudadas ao chão.
mas eu acho que a grande parte das ideias de design que eram genuinamente inovadoras, apesar de inconvencionais, ainda funcionam: o jogo não precisa de uma hud, visto que a sua munição é contada em voz alta pela protagonista e seus pontos de vida estão marcados em uma tatuagem feia no corpo dela, o qual você controla em primeira pessoa. eu também gosto do sistema de ossos, por mais que esse seja o aspecto mais cômico do jogo, onde você controla seu corpo manipulando os membros que deseja utilizar. isso significa que você pode mirar a sua arma sem precisar de mexer seu ponto de vista, dando um certo desafio maior pra quando um dinossauro está te atacando e decide empurrar a sua arma com a cabeça dele, te forçando a tentar realinhar ela para conseguir acertá-lo. eu gosto também que os dinossauros também se movem nesse mesmo sistema, o que significa que eles mexem individualmente as pernas para se locomover, muitas vezes se enrolando no processo e caindo no chão.
por mais que grande parte do meu apreço com o jogo se deve à clunkyness, são poucos os jogos que se dedicam a fazer sistemas inconvencionais que oferecem um nível maior de controle de seu corpo dentro de um videogame, e controlar a personagem é engajante quando você se acostuma. eu só não consigo elogiar mais pela da fase da cidade envolver puzzles de plataforma em primeira pessoa que me deixaram genuinamente nauseada. fora isso é um jogo que eu adoraria revisitar pela vibe imaculada de andar por aí numa selva tropical abandonada com o ocasional dinossauro vindo te morder. sabe como é
mas eu acho que a grande parte das ideias de design que eram genuinamente inovadoras, apesar de inconvencionais, ainda funcionam: o jogo não precisa de uma hud, visto que a sua munição é contada em voz alta pela protagonista e seus pontos de vida estão marcados em uma tatuagem feia no corpo dela, o qual você controla em primeira pessoa. eu também gosto do sistema de ossos, por mais que esse seja o aspecto mais cômico do jogo, onde você controla seu corpo manipulando os membros que deseja utilizar. isso significa que você pode mirar a sua arma sem precisar de mexer seu ponto de vista, dando um certo desafio maior pra quando um dinossauro está te atacando e decide empurrar a sua arma com a cabeça dele, te forçando a tentar realinhar ela para conseguir acertá-lo. eu gosto também que os dinossauros também se movem nesse mesmo sistema, o que significa que eles mexem individualmente as pernas para se locomover, muitas vezes se enrolando no processo e caindo no chão.
por mais que grande parte do meu apreço com o jogo se deve à clunkyness, são poucos os jogos que se dedicam a fazer sistemas inconvencionais que oferecem um nível maior de controle de seu corpo dentro de um videogame, e controlar a personagem é engajante quando você se acostuma. eu só não consigo elogiar mais pela da fase da cidade envolver puzzles de plataforma em primeira pessoa que me deixaram genuinamente nauseada. fora isso é um jogo que eu adoraria revisitar pela vibe imaculada de andar por aí numa selva tropical abandonada com o ocasional dinossauro vindo te morder. sabe como é
the developers were really ambitious but the execution leaves nothing short of an unpolished, frustrating tech demo