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One of my low-key favorite reveals from last night's PlayStation State of Play was The Lost Wild, a dinosaur-infested survival horror title developed by Great Ape Games and published by Annapurna Interactive. It had been so long that I'd managed to forget that The Lost Wild was actually first revealed way back in 2022, but the new trailer and accompanying details have me beyond excited for what these devs are cooking up.
Gary Napper serves as game director on The Lost Wild, drawing on his time helping build one of the best survival horror games of the modern era. "My experience working on Alien: Isolation has inevitably shaped how I approach horror design and is definitely a lens I view this game’s design through," he says in a PlayStation Blog post.
The Lost Wild will not load you up with shotguns and rocket launchers to take down the prehistoric creatures that populate it. "When encounters happen, players evade, hide, create distractions, and use the environment to escape," Napper explains, and the game avoids offering predictable attack patterns or obvious vulnerabilities to exploit.
"From the outset, our goal has been to create a world where dinosaurs are not framed as monsters, but as believable animals," Napper says. "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."
That's something even the best dinosaur games often miss, treating their star creatures as monsters rather than simply big, scary animals. The Lost Wild is certainly playing with tone to emphasize the terror here, as watching the seemingly impossible – yet pretty much realistic – Quetzalcoatlus lumbering around the foggy, burnt forest trailer is scarier than any shuffling zombie, but it's clear there's a grounding force here.
At this point, I'm not convinced that Capcom will ever give fans the Dino Crisis revival they've been demanding, and the drip-feed of information we've been getting about Jurassic Park Survival has been so slow that I'm still not sure what to expect from it. But between the trailer and Napper's design philosophy, I think The Lost Wild might be just what the raptor ordered.
The Lost Wild is scheduled to hit PS5 and PC in 2027.
There's a lot more coming in the Summer Game Fest 2026 schedule.
