Do you favor development for guests or your dinosaurs?
— Steam description
Parkasaurus is a tycoon game for Microsoft Windows developed by Washbear Studio. It entered early access on the 25th of September 2018, was fully released on PC on the 13th of August 2020, and a Nintendo Switch version was released on April 28th 2022.
The player is tasked with building and maintaining a dinosaur zoo while managing finances and employees. An important part of the game is making sure the dinosaurs are happy — if they're not, then the guests won't be either. Also, both the employees and dinosaurs can wear hats.
It has also received a few Downloadable Content expansion packs:
- Sea Monsters (11th August 2022) — adds prehistoric sea creatures.
- Prehistoric Wonders (13th June 2023) — adds various Cenozoic animals.
Parkasaurus contains examples of:
- Amazing Technicolour Wildlife: The dinosaurs all come in bold, bright colours.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Normally, when an animal escapes from its exhibit, it'll go on a rampage and will need to be tranquilised. If they can't move on land, however, they'll be instantly put into crates.
- Artistic License – Paleontology: Theropods don't have feathers, even with the "realistic" textures option.
- Central Theme: Animal welfare. Many of the campaign missions require the player to fix zoos that have been mistreating their dinosaurs.
- Creature-Breeding Mechanic: If an exhibit contains two animals of the same species and opposite sexes, the player can place a nest in there. If the dinosaurs are happy enough, an egg will appear the next day, and it will inherit colours and traits from its parents.
- Escaped Animal Rampage: If your animals get too bored or too hungry, they'll break down their fences and start attacking the guests.
- Extinct Animal Park: The game is about building your own theme park filled with dinosaurs and hosting it to the public. However, the process involves using a genetically bred chicken to lay dinosaur eggs, and is rather slow.
- Herbivores Are Friendly: Putting a vegetable into an egg's last two item slots will give the dinosaur that hatches the friendly trait.
- Nutritional Nightmare: Implied by Butter Thirsty, a food stall that sells butter sticks. It description says, "Is that your heart screaming?"
- RPG Elements: The employees have stats and gain experience. Whenever they level up, the player can choose which stat to increase.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the "hats" is an Elizabethan collar called the Cone of Shame, a nickname that originates from Up.
- The node on the science tree that unlocks the second-tier garbage bins is called Captain Planet.
- One of the decorations added in the Sea Monsters DLC is a pineapple house, like the one SpongeBob SquarePants lives in.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: The tutorial popup about tranquilising dinosaurs says "nothing bad ever happens at dinosaur parks, and certainly not at dinosaur parks in movies."
- Talking Animal: There's a small cast of talking dinosaurs who give you missions and tutorials.
- Taxonomic Term Confusion:
- The seven major groups of dinosaurs are called "families", even though they're not. The Sea Monsters DLC adds two more "families" — aquatic and semi-aquatic — which are more like broad descriptions.
- The animals are collectively referred to as "dinosaurs". While this makes sense in the base game, the DLCs add animals that couldn't even be mistaken for dinosaurs.
- Tech Tree: This game has two currencies that can be used to unlock new items from two trees. Hearts buy items that are used in dinosaur exhibits, while science credits buy items that appeal to guests.
- Terrifying Tyrannosaur: Tyrannosaurus is given an elevated status. It's one of the hardest dinosaurs to unlock, and it has one of the highest base appeal ratings, but also one of the highest scariness ratings.
- Tranquillizer Dart: You or your security staff have to shoot animals with tranquiliser darts in order to relocate them.
- Truly Single Parent: It's possible to give animals the parthenogenesis trait, which allows them to lay eggs without having an opposite-sex member of their species present.
- Vegetarian Carnivore: In Sea Monsters, Archelon is a herbivore, even thought it was an obligate carnivore in real life.
- Video Game Time: Each in-game day lasts a few minutes of real time.
- Whale Egg: All the animals hatch from eggs, including the fully-aquatic reptiles in Sea Monsters and the mammals in Prehistoric Wonders, who gave live birth in real life.
