In a year when mountain climbing is having a moment in video games, Terrible Lizards, WDR Studios’ horror platformer, asks, “Yes, but what about caves?” The caves in question lay outside Gallup, New Mexico, where Jordan’s car breaks down. It’s going to be a long wait for a tow truck, he’s told as he calls from a payphone outside a deserted Route 66 gas station. Does he have anywhere to hole up? In a lucky break, across the road towers Dalton’s Dinos: half museum and half dinosaur park.
Inside – and who wouldn’t go hang out in a 1990s dinosaur park to pass the time? – a Tannoy reminds us that we look with our eyes and not our hands (and mandates, in a vaguely threatening tone, that we all have a “rawr-some” time). An automated movie introduces us to the titular Dalton Coolidge (played in live-action with surprising confidence by developer Christian Ames) and his wife and business partner, Elena (portrayed with similar verve by Katy Bentz).
They elucidate the magic of palaeontology and the unearthing of a trove of curious fossils beneath this very establishment. It’s a cute, family-friendly welcome to the park. Though, not everything feels contiguous with the surroundings. Upstairs, you can find a child’s campsite, complete with crayon sketches, where the duo’s son wiled away the days as his parents were busy running Dalton’s Dinos. It’s hardly a frightening scene, but questions are already swelling as Terrible Lizards commences its unsettling and, mostly, atmospheric ride.
Your next signal of something being off is a set of mascot costumes hanging downstairs: the Paleo Pals. One of which, a memo notes, just won’t stop filling with black ooze. Turning your back and returning, you’ll find one of the hooks empty.
You’d be forgiven for rolling your eyes. Creepy mascots in an abandoned theme park? Ours is an industry of cloning and derivation, and WDR is, thankfully, not afraid to play with the expectations that engenders. As you spy the mascot, spewing the aforementioned black ooze, you’ll get the animatronic-led horror you expect but Terrible Lizards is pleasingly stingy with its monster.
Instead, it asks you to navigate what remains of Dalton’s Dinos and restore power to its exhibits. Fortunately, Jordan is an engineering student (with a relatable appreciation for the animatronics as he fires them up). Luckier still: he also happens to be a parkour fiend who can leap, swing, climb, and later bounce with the best of them. It’s a valuable skill in a park that’s seen better days. What looks like months of neglect has been exacerbated by a storm that swept through to leave many of the exhibits in tatters.
You’ll need to grapple – literally – with the verticality of the park, where most power controls and fuse boxes are high above the exhibits or in cunningly concealed back rooms. It’s a fun tour through the backstage of an imaginary dark ride. The more sinister underbelly of which is only hinted at, at first, through memos detailing the day-to-day challenges of running the park (and the costumed “employee” shadowing you).
Interspersed in those notes and recordings are the first signs that something more than palaeontological fascination drove the last days of Dalton’s Dinos. The bonhomie in the park’s marketing hides Dalton and Elena’s strained marriage and his distance from his son; tensions that only multiply as Dalton pursues a new venture, and a new dig, beneath the site.
It’s one of many things Jordan chats about as you explore. Though, this never feels overdone so much as someone psyching themselves up during a creepy – then terrifying – ordeal, both to himself and Stella. She’s a park employee and one of Dalton’s confidants, who calls in only to find Jordan alone on-site. Their relationship sees Kellen Goff and Amanda Hufford round out a strong cast – though a cameo by Matthew Patrick as Dr. Jonathan Fellows offers a conspicuous weak link in the voice acting – that propels a spry narrative.
Stella sends Jordan to the gift shop: a cavernous room of toys, adjoining an arcade, and filled with curiously platform-shaped ceiling hangings. It caps a couple of hours of wandering through spaces normally associated with crowds and, as such, is suitably uncanny. Credit to WDR for holding back on the monsters to create an atmosphere that both welcomes exploration but creates enough of a threat to have you guessing what’s coming round the next corner.
A threat that catches up to you as you search the gift shop office and get the first glimpse that Dalton unearthed more than bones beneath the park. The black ooze starts to make more sense as you’re tasked to restore power, dodging the shambling mascot in the process. It would be tempting to label this moment as a tepid release of tension. There’s no peril and the hobbling costume is hardly frightening. But WDR continues to surprise. This sequence, so expected, is only an introduction to an area you’ll need to navigate with significantly more alacrity shortly when the mysteries of the dig site below refuse to remain subterranean.
This is where Terrible Lizards is at its best: when you move fast, along clearly delineated routes, and in a rhythm of swinging and jumping that immediately calls to mind the pace of Mirror’s Edge. You fly across obstacles – pipes, cranes, and platforms – that make little real-world sense but offer dynamic and propulsive movement through rapidly closing doors and away from the caves’ denizens.
The game feels less accomplished when it slows you down, often in much larger rooms that ask you to scout out less clear paths and puzzles. Breathers that offer opportunities to gather lore, chat up Stella, and piece together the real story of what happened down here, but that lack the direction of the game’s best sequences.
It’s a hard contrast with how well-balanced parkour sequences feel, shifting from frantic jumps and slides to quick jumps between handholds. Though, they are necessary respites, feeling like taking a deep breath before the next plunge, but rooting around a series of repeating caves and labs is far less compelling than snooping around an abandoned dinosaur park.
One can sympathise, it’s a difficult balance to strike between holding onto that park and it growing old. The caves offer far more movement variation – including a satisfying trampoline system later on – and it is a decent rhythm, but it’s inescapable how sterile they feel by comparison. The real roadblock here, however, is how much these caves lose the atmosphere and tension of the above-ground areas. When it would benefit from continuing to turn the screw, Terrible Lizards lets the fizz out of the bottle and can’t get it back in.
Credit to WDR again, Terrible Lizards resists the urge to artificially induce tension by adding unnecessary stealth to its sequences – which invariably has the opposite effect in other games. But there’s a sense it needed to go one way or the other: to continue ratcheting that unnerving tension or lean completely into the claustrophobic loneliness that creeps in underground but never quite takes hold.
It may come as no surprise then that a lengthy final stretch, with a gently increasing cast of monsters, does spill some of that initial wind from the sails. It’s a slowing, however, rather than a complete arresting of momentum. Terrible Lizards has enough of a push to propel you through its weaker areas thanks to a well-written and well-paced narrative.
There are some inconsistencies. Sliding isn’t precise and you will miss door timings and handholds you would swear you should reach hurtle out of view regularly. WDR offers generous checkpoints to minimise and mitigate those frustrations. But it’s last three-quarters do feel uneven compared to its introduction.
That said, parkour games are fairly thin on the ground these days outside their use as secondary mechanics in adventure games. Terrible Lizards doesn’t reinvent anything. It’s not novel and not revelatory – nor does it need to be. But what it does do is so solid and so tight, in a genre that’s underserved, that it catches its handhold where it counts for a breezy, occasionally breathless, go-round that at its best marries high-speed movement with prehistoric dread.
