Upcoming survival horror indie game The Lost Wild looks to give players a thrilling adventure where you have to be tactical without fighting in the wilderness of dinosaurs. During Summer Game Fest, we had the opportunity to watch a demo showcasing the game’s mechanics.

Escape to Survive

Developed by Great Ape Games, the first-person survival game puts players in a situation where you are trapped on an island that carries one of the worst predators around, dinosaurs. Instead of acting on combat, The Lost Wild focuses more on observing, stealth, and avoiding confrontation. Otherwise, you’ll be greeted with a cutscene of the dinosaur taking your life.

Players can grab objects like bottles and throw them at a distance to create a distraction. This gives you time to swiftly move through the tall grass and avoid attracting your predator’s attention. Even the player was surprised by the dinosaur’s location during the demo. It appears that the game randomly places these dinosaurs in different spots, so do not expect to use the same routine and plan every time. Players will have to move carefully, watching their sensor icon located at the top of the screen. This helps indicate if you are out in the open and if a predator has spotted you. I also noticed that once you are spotted, you shouldn’t expect to outrun the predator unless you make a swift move to an enclosed room to wait or quickly transition to the next scene. Expect many anxious moments and jump scares to occur when first playing the game.

The game isn’t trying to become a Dino Crisis or Jurassic Park game; instead, dinosaurs act like animals surviving in the wilderness, and players need to survive by closely observing and making quick decisions if they want to get off the island. You may feel vulnerable, and that’s a style of gameplay you hardly see in many games.

Visually Timid

The visuals of The Lost Wild give it that cinematic look and feel. There’s tension while slowly rustling through thick vegetation, thunderstorms brewing with flash effects, and dense fog that makes it difficult to see. The island’s dense forests, rocky cliffs, and rivers running make it a surreal wilderness.

As mentioned earlier, dinosaurs act more like living animals and not as vicious monsters you see in movies. They also carry detailed textures and natural body proportions. They move through the wilderness in lifelike movements and give off behaviors you don’t normally see in vicious monsters like sniffing in the air, lurking around, and investigating noises. Treating these beasts as smart predators. Players are in for a ride to try and survive.

Overall, The Lost Wild is shaping up to be a unique survival horror game in which players are the prey, constantly fleeing from predators on an uninhabited island. It’s a game I would enjoy playing and watching others play.

The Lost Wild is set to launch in 2027 for the PlayStation and PC. Fans can visit the game’s official website for more information and purchasing options. We appreciate Annapurna Interactive for giving us the opportunity to watch this thriller demo at the Summer Game Fest.