Announced back in 2022 and shown during June 2026’s edition of the PlayStation State of Play, the pitch for The Lost Wild from developer Great Ape Games and publisher Annapurna Interactive is simple: what if you played a game in the style of Alien Isolation, but with dinosaurs in a lost island (cue Jurassic Park comparison).
A narrative based, single player survival game, The Lost Wild puts you in the shoes of Saskia Martinson as she makes her way through a mysterious island that’s overgrown with prehistoric wildlife. Guided via a mysterious voice, Saskia pieces together clues over what happened in the installations of this mysterious island, why there is prehistoric life living here, and what do the weird dimensional anomalies have to do with everything that has transpired.
During an early alpha, playable hands off demo shown at Play Days, we got to see a little bit of the general gameplay flow of The Lost Wild. While set on overgrown island, the game is seemingly employing a wide linear approach, with direct pathing via specific diagetic choices before sending you inside the mysterious lab. The different areas you see in The Lost Wild are built around environmental storytelling and giving you clues about what happened.
After an extended walking section, we saw Saskia encountering the first dinosaur (to which the game’s director told us is one of many), and immediately we start seeing the cat and mouse evasion gameplay. Considering the game is going to be built around many dinosaurs, the one we saw, the Alisaurus, didn’t seem like he was a perpetual ever presence like the Xenomorph in Alien Isolation. But he was still a neck breather nonetheless, and a few times in our demo, killed Saskia in the middle of performing different actions many times at the most inopportune times, causing a couple checkpoint resets.
During said resets, we got to see the game’s wide linear design where you could try approaching the objective via different pathing, as well as a little bit of the survival mechanics like looting and scouring different items that could be used for distractions. The game’s director told us the game is emphasizing evasion gameplay above everything else, so word if eventually you could get weapons that could help you stave off the dinosaurs.
The demo concluded with Saskia making her way inside the labs as a mysterious voice gave her a few hints about what happened to this island, before there was an anomalous explosion that concluded the demo. Whether the full game is able to built upon its mysteries and deliver on the perpetual cat and mouse tension of the dinosaur evasion remains to be, but what we saw seemed promising despite a few graphical glitches during the times the dinosaur killed Saskia.
The game is slated to be released sometime in 2027 on PlayStation 5, Steam and the Epic Games Store. As always stay tuned for more in the near future!