Hi, I’m Gary Napper, Game Director at Great Ape Games. It’s great to finally be talking about The Lost Wild, a game where you don’t fight dinosaurs. You survive around them.
The Lost Wild is survival horror built on three things: observation, instinct, and restraint. Watching where a dinosaur looks before you move. Holding still when something taller than the building you’re hiding behind walks past. Knowing when not to run. In this post, I want to talk about the design philosophy behind it.
From the outset, our goal has been to create a world where dinosaurs are not framed as monsters, but as believable animals. 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.
This philosophy shaped every major design decision, influencing not only how the dinosaurs behave, but how it feels to survive alongside them.
We emphasize tension through vulnerability. The player is not equipped to kill these creatures, although they can find tools to defend themselves. The experience avoids gamified or arcade-like systems that would undermine that tone. There are no exaggerated weak points or predictable attack patterns designed for exploitation. Instead, survival depends on observation, learning, and reaction. When encounters happen, players evade, hide, create distractions, and use the environment to escape.
Players are encouraged to study the behavior of how a dinosaur moves, how it reacts to sound, how it occupies space. Watching to see if an Allosaur is going to detect you, or lose interest if you stay still enough. Fear doesn’t come purely from threat, but from uncertainty, as each emergent encounter leads to a tense cat-and-mouse fight for your life. At the same time, we want to evoke a sense of awe and respect. These are not villains; they are animals behaving exactly as they should. That creates a more complex emotional response and one that blends fear with fascination.
The environments in The Lost Wild are dense, claustrophobic, and unforgiving, with abandoned buildings embedded within an overgrown wilderness. This is not a wide-open safari, it’s a place where visibility is limited, paths are unclear, and the landscape itself can disorient you. Through this, we create the feeling of being lost, both physically and psychologically.
Storytelling in The Lost Wild is designed to be discovered rather than force-fed. We aim for a cinematic level of immersion, but without pulling the player out of the experience through heavy-handed exposition or intrusive UI elements. The narrative is grounded and personal, unfolding through exploration, interaction, and observation.
As Saskia explores, she begins to uncover traces of what happened on the island—and why it was abandoned. She discovers abandoned spaces, subtle environmental details, and sees traces of fragmented human presence. Notebooks. Hastily left meals. Discarded ID passes. Not everything is explained outright. We believe there is power in leaving gaps, in allowing players to interpret and question what they find. This approach creates a deeper, more lasting engagement with the story.
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. 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. 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.
More broadly, I think there’s a growing appetite for experiences that move away from the power fantasy. Horror becomes far more effective when the player feels exposed, when control is limited, and when success is uncertain. The Lost Wild leans into that approach offering an experience where survival is never guaranteed and dominance is never assumed.
Ultimately, The Lost Wild is about placing players into a world that feels grounded, real, indifferent, and alive, and then asking them to navigate it not as a hero, but as something far more fragile but relatable. “If I were there, what would I do?”
In doing so, we hope to create a kind of fear that feels different. Not just the fear of being chased or attacked, but the deeper unease of realising you are no longer in control. You are being watched, tracked, and understood by something that doesn’t hate you… but doesn’t need to.
We believe that in the space between fear and understanding, something truly memorable can emerge.
The Lost Wild releases on PS5 in 2027 and is available to wishlist today.
