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Dinosaurs, like any behemoth animal that acts on impulse, are terrifying. How they vanished from the video game zeitgeist, only to see zombies quite literally everywhere, is a shift I’ll never be able to make sense of.
During Summer Game Fest, we got to see a brief presentation showing about half an hour of the new Annapurna-published survival horror game, The Lost Wild. In the game, Saskia wakes in a forest somewhere after a car accident and has no memory of anything. Beckoned onward by a low roar in the distance, she quickly discovers that not only is she not alone, but there are dinosaurs afoot. Almost like seeing the polar bear show up in Lost for the first time, it’s certainly out of place and lends itself superbly to the mystery that pushes The Lost Wild’s cart along.
The original pitch for The Lost Wild was a video game where dinosaurs behave as animals rather than the monsters they’re often perceived as. With a focus on evasion, The Lost Wild truly emphasises the survival in survival horror as it’s not Saskia’s purpose to kill these beasts and, quite frankly, she has no means to. We’re introduced to the first dinosaur, a towering Allosaurus, right after Saskia encounters the first person she’s seen since waking in the forest. Far less interested in asking as many questions as Saskia, the dino swiftly kills the man in what is a visceral disemboweling.
And so begins The Lost Wild’s beating heart, the cat and mouse game between Saskia and the dinos roaming about. Exploration is a vital part of staying alive in this strange place, and the game seemingly does a phenomenal job of environmental storytelling. Things as simple as busted guardrails and makeshift weather monitoring labs help players piece a story together, while a lookout tower in the distance, lit up like a glowing beacon, points the way. It’s a case of ‘show, don’t tell,’ and I was engrossed by the turns the twenty-minute showing took narratively.
Keeping a low profile as you’re actively hunted by one of the game’s apex predators is the best bet of surviving; you’re able to use all of the cunning at your disposal to survive these short sandboxes, but there’s an unpredictability to the predator’s behaviours that manages to catch even the game’s demoist off-guard. After securing a key card required for progressing past a powered-down gate, the game introduces throwable items that can be used to draw the dino from its path, effectively carving one out for the player. After setting off a car alarm with a well-placed bottle, they opened the door to make a quiet exit, only to find the Allosaurus stomping right past the door in what was a genuine heart-in-throat moment.
The Lost Wild has several of the hallmarks of a survival horror game, but the one I enjoyed seeing most was physical, and limited, safe disks, which can be used at data upload points to save the player’s progress. The one we saw was conveniently placed right before the Allo entered this small stalking ground, meaning the consequence for getting chomped was minimal, but I hope that there’ll be difficult choices to make later on with regards to resources, even beyond the save disks.
Like any stealth game worth its salt, The Lost Wild has a sight indicator—represented by placeholder icons for the demo’s purpose—that lets the player know in real-time whether they’re hidden from view, in plain sight, or if they’re spotted. Although I wasn’t on the sticks, I felt a pang of panic as the indicator turned yellow on the short run back to the gate controls. To say the scramble for the exit was a mad panic is an understatement, but it’s encouraging that even these introductory levels can go off-script in an instant.
The next beat, set within the confines of an abandoned lab, once owned by the Idehama corporation, served as a brief reprieve from the cat and mouse game and introduced us to Daiske, an employee left behind “after the madness began.” All in all, this viewing of The Lost Wild, if nothing else, sowed the seeds of an unexpectedly fun, sci-fi mystery that piggybacks on the tried and true ‘stranger in a strange land’ trope.
In service of all of the game’s horror are its incredible, atmospheric visuals. From the jump, the environments stood out as an enormous highlight and scene setter in creating an unsettling vibe. The moonlight that peers through the canopies dominates the fog that blankets the floor and curls around the trees. While we’ve seen just one for reference, as the veritable stars of the game, the dinosaurs effortlessly strike fear with their hard-to-anticipate, but beautifully animated, movement.
The sound design is sure to be an equally important part of The Lost Wild’s core experience. Of course, we were sitting in a curated theater experience, complete with a booming sound system that rattled the seats, but for as much as I reactively held my breath as Saskia in the quieter moments, the Allo’s thunderous stride rocked my shit.
After this showing, I’m so fascinated by The Lost Wild. It’s hard not to fantasise about all of the different dinos the game will have, how their behaviours might vary, and how the story’s mystery could unfold. If this game manages to serve up anything resembling Jurassic Park’s legendary raptors in the kitchen scene, we’ll be in for one hell of a treat.
