The Stack

I seem to be finally getting into the swing of this game. It keeps opening new parts of the complex by introducing new mechanics, like using a portable fingerprint scanner on eviscerated corpses to reconfigure biometric ID cards. But regardless of how much of my time I spend on such things, the central concern is which hallways contain dinosaurs, which dinosaur-containing hallways I can avoid, and whether I have enough ammo to kill the dinosaurs in the hallways that I anticipate needing to pass through multiple times. I spent a long time hunting for an ammo cache that I had seen once and forgotten where it was, only to find that it was less necessary than I believed, because the raptors I wanted to kill turned out to be avoidable. Even when you’re in the same hallway as a raptor, there’s the possibility that you can reach the door you want before it gets you; even if you can’t, there’s the option of running for it anyway, getting mauled a little, and applying a medipack on reaching safety. The only real concern is getting repeatedly attacked by the same creatures and wasting more resources than necessary on it — whether healing items for yourself or sedatives for the creature.

One thing I didn’t grasp at first is that the raptors actually do move between rooms occasionally, so if there’s a corridor you want to keep clear, you pretty much have to clear the adjacent rooms as well. Ultimately, it may be worthwhile to kill everything you can. And that’s kind of a shame, because a living dinosaur specimen would be an invaluable find. A single compsognathus in a pet carrier could probably fund the entire operation.

But that would involve rethinking the mission parameters in light of the new intelligence, that there are dinosaurs running around. This might seem like the sort of thing that you’d want to radio back to base about, if only so the next team would know what to prepare for in the event of a TPK, but it doesn’t even seem to occur to anybody here. I suppose we can blame the team leader. He’s the silver-haired-but-muscular sort of fictional soldier, like the end boss in the movie Avatar, and shares the usual traits of that type, like hardness of both head and heart. In short, exactly the sort to push ahead with the mission regardless of circumstances, even when his crew starts dying. I won’t be at all surprised if he turns out to be in league with the dinosaurs.