Annapurna Interactive have shared a new trailer and fresh details for The Lost Wild, a survival horror game set on an island of wrecked scientific bases, where dinosaurs have somehow endured into the modern era – a kind of “jurassic park”, if you will. Announced back in 2022, it’s the work of Great Ape Games, a team of seasoned UK developers with credits at Rare, Hanger 13, The Chinese Room, and Supermassive. The creative director is Gary Napper, who joined in 2025 according to his LinkedIn. Inevitably, the latest press materials focus pretty heavily on Napper’s previous experience working on Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation. Like that game, The Lost Wild challenges you to outwit and evade some dynamic and adaptable enemy AI: you don’t appear to have any weapons, so making use of distractions and the environment is key.
The major thematic break from Isolation, according to Napper, is that the developers want you to avoid killing the dinosaurs because they are fellow beings who are just trying to survive. Not like those awful Aliens, who are just metaphors for sex, capitalism and the Vietnam War.
“The difference here is not just that you can’t fight back, it’s that you feel like you shouldn’t,” he comments. This echoes the debate over whether players should be able to kill, or at least, violently deter sea monsters in Subnautica 2. It also feels like an ethos carried forward from Napper’s previous project at Rare – the abandoned Everwild, which was once described as a blend of adventure game and God sim with no combat. Hmmm!
In The Lost Wild, you play Saskia, a lady who has unaccountably found herself on an archipelago covered in terrible lizards. It’s a regular smorgasbord of dinosaur types – varied enough to furnish an actual dinosaur smorgasbord, if this were a game about butchering things. There are pack hunters and apex predators, sneakers and fliers, creatures as big as buildings and dinos tiddly enough to join you beneath that table you’re currently cowering under, AIEEE get away from me no no no please not the face.
I think the scariest one is the Quetzalcoatlus (citation needed) who patrols one misty woodland in the trailer. It gives me the heeby-jeebies because look here, I thought that was a flying dinosaur, so why is it hunting me on all fours? Pick a lane, Quetzalcoatlus (citation needed).
If all of these beasties are worth avoiding, the developers don’t want you to perceive them simply as threats. “From the outset, our goal has been to create a world where dinosaurs are not framed as monsters, but as believable animals,” Napper remarks in a post on the PlayStation blog. “They exist within the world with their own instincts, behaviors, and drives. This shift in perspective fundamentally changes the player’s role. You are not the dominant force, the hero or the conqueror, you are the outsider, vulnerable and exposed, trying to navigate a food chain where you no longer sit at the top.”
All of which naturally owes plenty to Napper’s time as a humble xenomorph-wrangler, back in the early 2010s. Alien: Isolation “has inevitably shaped how I approach horror design and is definitely a lens I view this game’s design through,” he goes on. “One of the key lessons from that project was the importance of restraint of when to show creatures, allowing space for the player’s imagination to do the work and to let the world and systems breathe.
“In Alien: Isolation, the creature was terrifying not just because of what it could do, but because of what players imagined it was going to do,” Napper writes. “The sense of anticipation and fear built in the unknown. That same principle applies here in a lot of ways. By treating dinosaurs as systemic, unpredictable entities rather than scripted events, we create a more dynamic and personal form of horror. The difference here is not just that you can’t fight back, it’s that you feel like you shouldn’t. Maintaining a respect for the dinosaurs as living creatures, while trying to survive in a world with them.”
In general, Napper feels that “there’s a growing appetite for experiences that move away from the power fantasy”. Again, I find all this reminiscent of Everwild, or at least, of the little we knew about Everwild, prior to its cancellation. The game cast players as caretakers of a colourful wilderness, endowed with the ability “to sense and feel how magic flows through nature and connects every living thing”. I doubt you’ll be forging any enchanted bonds with The Lost Wild’s Quetzalcoatlus (citation needed), somehow, but there are definitely some overlapping sentiments here. Anyway, if you want to play an actual Jurassic Park survival game, keep your peepers peeled for Jurassic Park: Survival.
