Deathground's new gameplay trailer is a tense lesson in outsmarting dinosaurs

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Staying silent as the grave is key to surviving in Deathground, a new solo or co-op survival horror from Jaw Drop Games

The first gameplay trailer for Deathground shows you how to outwit dinosaurs and previews what happens when you don't.

It's a tense, uncomfortably quiet teaser for what's looking more and more like one of the best dinosaur survival game in years. "A solo and co-op survival horror game that throws players into a desperate battle for survival against deadly AI dinosaurs," reads the description from Deathground's Kickstarter page, which still has 21 days to meet its goal.

Your mission as an unusually brave hunter in a world overrun by dinosaurs is to retrieve valuable loot from "Deathgrounds," which are usually panic-inducing places draped in shadows and mapped with narrow tunnels and cramped hiding spaces.

You and up to two friends are tasked with finding an assigned target and sneaking past surprisingly lightfooted dinos to the extraction point. Spawn points, targets, and extraction points are all randomized each match, and dinosaurs will adapt to your tactics and adjust their own predatory patterns accordingly, so surviving requires strategy. There is some shooting, but ammo is sparse and noise is your enemy, so stealth is the name of the game.

The trailer up top shows you some of the ways you can evade the lethal claws of your scaled stalkers. It seems like it's important to keep a constant eye on where the dinosaurs are and use hiding spots to your advantage. And in the event you wind up with a velociraptor on your trail, well, you run like hell.

Jaw Drop is an independent studio from the UK with developers who've worked on some real gems of the horror genre, including Soma, Amnesia, and Alien Isolation. Deathground is still in pre-alpha, but it's definitely one to follow leading up to a planned 2021 Early Access period and 2022 release on Steam.

Steel your nerves and navigate the best survival horror games you can play right now.

Jordan Gerblick
Jordan Gerblick

After earning an English degree from ASU, I worked as a corporate copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. I got my big break here in 2019 with a freelance news gig, and I was hired on as GamesRadar's west coast Staff Writer in 2021. That means I'm responsible for managing the site's western regional executive branch, AKA my home office, and writing about whatever horror game I'm too afraid to finish.