Merry Crisis

Capcom’s history is both broad and deep to the point where it’s nigh impossible to play everything of note. One of my most significant blind spots was Dino Crisis, a franchise I just never got to despite playing all the PS1 Resident Evil games and being a dyed in the wool survival horror sicko that defends tank controls at every opportunity. I’d love to give you an entertaining reason, maybe some sort of latent dino phobia, but I can’t. I’ve already played Sunsoft’s T.R.A.G., for chrissake! I don’t have an excuse! Since GOG just re-released Dino Crisis 1 and 2, I took it as a sign and spent 6 hours on the former.

I wish I had replayed T.R.A.G. instead.

This? This is what y’all are nostalgic for? You wanted a remake of this? Why? This isn’t “Resident Evil: Dinosaur Edition” like so many claim, nor is it “panic horror” or whatever the hell they called it back in the day. It’s just a clumsy point and click adventure game that occasionally remembers to throw a dinosaur at you and doesn’t have the decency to let you navigate with a mouse instead of rubbing your face against every damn pixel to find where you can finally insert your fiftieth fucking key card.

Dino Crisis opens by lying to you. It feels like it was made with the assumption that you had played at least one Resident Evil game prior, because it introduces its mechanics in a similar fashion only to immediately subvert your expectations. You get a feel for the controls, the menuing, the whole shebang. You use items on items. All’s good so far. Then they throw a raptor at you. You can shoot it, but if you’re truly Resi-pilled you’ll run past it. The thing is fast, of course, but you get to a doorway and, after the door entry animation that never fails to put Regina’s ass in center frame, you move on. The music calms down. The rules, as you know them, still apply. You start to walk away.

Then the fucker just hops the fence. I cackled when this happened. These aren’t zombies! These are clever bastards, and they’re hungry! Of course they’ll pursue you from area to area! The idea of a survival horror game with fewer, smarter enemies that each work like a mini-Nemesis? That’s an incredible premise! I couldn’t wait to see what they did with different enemy types, the broader map, the resource management considering how much more dangerous these enemies were, the potential was incredible! And they don’t. Do. Anything with it.

Fighting is never correct in Dino Crisis. The right answer to nearly every engagement is to shimmy past the lizards and just leave. You can’t be followed into most areas, and the ones where you can give you plenty of room to just run in a circle or wiggle on by. The vast majority of hits I took in my playthrough were in the lategame, a direct result of atrocious dino spawns just outside of doors that were completely unavoidable as they can seemingly start their swipe the moment you load in. 

Even when you do decide to go loud, presumably out of boredom, combat sucks ass. In a game with a whole 3 weapons to choose from there is only One True Weapon: the shotgun. Your pistol is borderline useless against anything bigger than a Compy. The “grenade gun” and its “grenade bullets” were effective, but rare enough that they didn’t warrant excessive use. Meanwhile the shotgun fires all kinds of goofy rounds, several of which you can just make more of. Sleep darts ended up being by far the most effective option because regular gunshots barely accomplished anything, and also allowed dinos to potentially feign death only to snag my ankles, which wasn’t worth the risk or extra effort. It’s not like they stayed dead long enough to justify the expenditure, why bother?

So if we’re not engaging with the titular dinos, what’s the crisis about? Science. And by science I mean keycards. Regina doesn’t know anything about anything as far as lab experiments go, but she knows how to glue two halves of a key together and then do a word search off the back of a cereal box to open a door. I have to imagine there’s an in-character reason for this because I cannot understand why we’ve ditched all the creativity of Resident Evil’s puzzles just to repeat the same damn routine of locating key piece X1, then key piece X2, finding the only door that accepts them, and solving a basic alphabet cipher at least half a dozen times.

You think I’m exaggerating? I’m really not! Dino Crisis’s puzzles have so little variety for the majority of its runtime that I was genuinely surprised when it opted to just have me find a pile of 5 or so collectibles to advance the plot in the late game instead of doing this 3 more times. There are other puzzles interspersed throughout, but they range from memory activity for children to “can you identify some sounds”. There is an infamous 3D pipe puzzle early on, but I lucked into the first half of the solution just pressing buttons so it presented no friction. By far the worst section was right before the final plot choice, where the game stopped trying entirely and just had me run across the generator area and its side rooms for most of an hour, touching objects and buttons in exactly the correct sequence, checking off menial steps from an in-game manual that doesn’t bother to explain which of the 5 or so computers strewn across the map activates the initializer. You want to know how many dinosaurs interrupted me during this process? A whole one. In a hallway. Which I walked out of. Fuck me.

This was to some extent my own fault. One of DC’s most notable features is its use of branching paths, or more specifically, having two ways to advance the plot which immediately rejoin the main track upon completion. These deviations are presented as two buddies in your unit butting heads over how to solve problems. Gail wants to get his hands dirty, meanwhile Kirk desperately wants to do more shitty puzzles. I can appreciate the attempt at adding replay value without just copying Resi 2’s homework, but neither choice is ever enjoyable. The former mostly consists of running past dinosaurs some more, and the latter replaces the lizard-shaped obstacles with increasingly difficult grade school workbooks. I picked Kirk more often than Gail because I found his 90’s hackerman gimmick funny and I largely regretted it, especially later on. For the love of god do not pick Kirk’s third choice. It doesn’t negatively affect your ending or anything, you basically pick that at the end and all of them suck, it’s just particularly miserable to play.

Upon finishing the game I did a bit more research. It may shock you to learn that DC had a bit of a troubled development! In an era where games were often taking 1-2 years to produce from start to finish, a short sprint for bigger studios like Capcom, this started in ‘96 and had a director change halfway through before eventually tumbling out in ’99. Shu Takumi was at the helm for a while, but stated the following in an interview:

“They made me director of Dino Crisis (1), but now I look back, I don’t think I even knew what it meant to be a “director”. Because of that, I put the team in confusion, and was fired as the director…… (laugh).”

He goes on to state that he was demoted to “planner”, which made room for Shinji Mikami to take the fancy folding chair again. Word is he was largely responsible for the game’s first half where Mikami took on the second. That surprised me because I love most of Mikami’s action games, but the first half of DC contains the entirety of its good bits. They apparently gave Takumi the director role again for the sequel, and despite how rough of a time I had here, I may well give it a shot just to see how the change in leadership affected the end result. I hear it actually has you fight the dinosaurs! What a concept!

Dino Crisis can’t decide if it wants to be a panic-inducing action game or a puzzly adventure, and it plants its ass on the fenceposts so hard that it impales itself. There’s not a single thing this game does better than the other notables of its era. Capcom cornered the market on survival horror elsewhere, with Resi 3 in particular being the strongest. Give Nightmare Creatures a shot if you want something that balances horror and action. Are you only here for polygonal 5th gen dinosaurs? Go play one of Nightdive’s Turok reduxes! Hell, if all you want is a wonky action/horror hybrid with a 90s-ass voice cast, Blue Stinger came out the same year. I applaud GOG’s preservation efforts and look forward to what else their Dreamlist initiative brings us, but this feels like their team was so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Bring back both Overblood games, you cowards.

4/10