In a new trailer for Jurassic World Aftermath, courtesy of Mashable, we have an exciting look at where the upcoming VR game by Oculus Studios may fit into the timeline of the Jurassic World films – potentially tying into the pre-established canon in a much more interesting way than we anticipated.
With only roughly one minute worth of footage, there are two interesting points which we wanted to focus on within this trailer. The first is that the protagonist who we are playing as within the game appears to have been on Isla Nublar before – with her remarking that ‘it’s like coming home’. Whilst this could just be a line to describe how she is feeling, the odd placement of it suggests that there is actually much more depth to the protagonist than we originally anticipated – with her possibly being a former employee for the doomed park. If Jurassic Park showed us one thing with Dennis Nedry, it was that park employees can be bought, so we wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case in the upcoming game.
The second, and much more interesting detail, is the fact that the trailer reveals that our character has an hour to ‘enter the lab and recover the genome’. Given that the character is recovering a genome and not something like a life specimen, we are willing to be that this is a snatch and grab operation which preludes the operation which we see at the start of Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom – meaning that Eli Mills could be involved in this operation to some extent. Indeed, at 00:19 in the trailer, we do hear a character who sounds an awful lot like the disgraced Dr. Henry Wu, and the accompanying Mashable article confirms Wong’s return as the titular character in this game.
What this suggests, to us, is simple – Jurassic World Aftermath takes place between Jurassic World and Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, providing the first steps for the eventual creation of the Indoraptor in the latter film. The point of contention here, however, is the fact that we see a mercenary team return to Isla Nublar at the start of Fallen Kingdom – so either they realised that they needed more resources to complete the production of the Indoraptor or, more likely, the mission which we embark on within Aftermath may ultimately be a failure.
The potential to tie into the canon poses an interesting question about the rest of the trailer here, however, as we see plenty of ‘wild’ Velociraptors present across the island, and we also see the return of the Dilophosaurus. Whilst the latter is not a far stretch and is highly likely, the presence of multiple Velociraptors does seem to be somewhat canon-breaking, unless there is extra storytelling built in to explain the expansion of the IBRIS Project raptors we see in 2015’s Jurassic World. It has long been speculated that there may be other Raptors on Nublar, anyway, so we are interested to see if this is confirmed through this game – and how that may influence other stories like Camp Cretaceous.
Regardless of its canonicity, Jurassic World Aftermath looks set to be an exciting adventure in a fully realised park filled with Dinosaurs, and we are excited to see how fans of the franchise receive the new game when it debuts on the Oculus tomorrow (December 17th).
What do you think? Are you excited for the new game? Let us know in the comments below, and stay tuned to The Jurassic Park Podcast for all of the latest Jurassic news.
Written by:
Tom Fishenden