In Terrible Lizards, a dinosaur closing in means finding a way up, over, or out. There’s no weapon to reach for. To survive its runaway animatronics, you’ll need to climb, wall-run and find an escape route.
WDR Studios’ game launched on October 29 and joined Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on the same day. Xbox lists support for Series X|S, PC and cloud.
The setting is Dalton’s Dinos, an abandoned Route 66 attraction in New Mexico, in 1992. Your car has broken down, the staff have disappeared, and a voice on a telephone asks you to find a missing child. Getting back in the car and leaving isn’t much of an option.
Your escape route matters
The publisher’s game page says the creatures are faster than you in a straight line. That makes the terrain part of your survival plan: you’ll need to connect jumps, climbs, slides and wall-runs to get away, rather than simply sprint down a corridor and hope for the best.
There is some room to recover when a jump goes wrong. In his Xbox Wire explanation of the movement system, game director John Gelardi says you can adjust your trajectory after takeoff. Overshoot a landing or drift sideways, and you can correct your path while you’re still airborne.
That’s a useful detail if you struggle to judge jumps from a first-person perspective. Gelardi describes the same air control as something experienced players can use to find quicker routes and sometimes skip parts of a platforming sequence.
It isn’t one uninterrupted chase
Gelardi describes several ways the creatures put movement to the test. Some encounters are direct pursuits; others involve collapsing surroundings or open arenas where a monster roams while you work out objectives and an escape.
Between those encounters, there’s platforming, exploration and environmental puzzle-solving. Tapes, notes and recordings help explain what happened at the attraction.
Check your plan before downloading
The current Xbox store listing includes Terrible Lizards with Ultimate and PC Game Pass. Ultimate includes cloud play; PC Game Pass covers the PC download. Premium and Essential members need to purchase the game to stream it with those plans.
As of November 2, the US Xbox store lists it at $19.99, down from $24.99. PC players can also download a free demo on Steam to try the movement before committing.
Featured image: Xbox Series X and Series S consoles (representative hardware photo, not Terrible Lizards gameplay). Photo: Kyu3a / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; resized.