Terrible Lizards brings dinos back into the horror spotlight (also parkour?!)
Dinos used to be all the rage in popular media. Jurassic Park in the theaters, Dino Crisis in our PS1s, and existential dread dinosaur puppets on our TVs in the show Dinosaurs.
But as the years went on, our collective love affair with dinos has seemed to slip. The Jurassic franchise has desperately tried to recapture the magic of the old era, to incredibly mixed (read: mostly bad) results, and where are all the dinos in games?
Leave it to the indies to try to bring them back, and to resurface the inherent fear wrought by these incomprehensible creatures from another era.
With their debut game Terrible Lizards, WDR Studios is ready to bring dinosaur dread back into the spotlight, and I expect they're gonna get their claws into us in a fearsome way.
This prehistoric, panic-fueled parkour game has been on our radar for some time, and with the game set to launch on October 29, 2026, we reached into the archives to share our talk with the team and takeaways from our demo preview at PAX West 2025. While the demo we played was its earliest, the information is still timely and the excitement still lingers. If the game catches your eye, you can play its latest demo on Steam right now. It has two parts: a story-focused section and a gameplay-focused section that unlocks after you complete the first.
Just the Facts |
Developer: WDR Studios |
Genre: Parkour focused indie mascot/creature horror |
Release Date: October 29, 2026 |
We got the chance to get in on Terrible Lizards early, playing the first public demo for the parkour horror game at PAX West 2025, where it was one of the PAX Rising showcase selections.
Its developer, WDR Studio, is born from the collaboration of folks that make up the incredibly successful YouTube channel JT Music.
With five million subscribers and their top video (THAT Five Nights at Freddy's Song) netting more than 280 million views in the decade it’s been around, JT Music has been a sensation, and they're branching out into making the kinds of games that inspired their so-called nerdcore music. Leveraging their connections and fetching folks from across the indie space, including Narrative Lead Manda Farough who we know best from her work with Strange Scaffold, WDR Studios is set to make a bold statement with their debut.
"With JT Music, we've known each other since we were children," John Gelardi, WDR Studio's Creative Director, told us at PAX. "So it's just seamless. We've been doing it for 17 years. Then you hop over to game development and we've got a team, we're bringing people in. A lot of the team are creatives who've been doing creative stuff since high school or even before that. So it's just about bringing everyone together. The talent's there, it's just figuring out how it all fits."
Terrible Lizards is an interesting kind of indie horror game, one that leans on both the old and the new. It's a little bit of the trendy mascot horror that's dominated gaming for the last decade-plus, mixed with some of that creature feature monster horror that made the genre what it is today. Both work together incredibly well.
In Terrible Lizards, you lace up your parkour boots as Jordan, a kid on a road trip to LA for college, who suddenly finds himself stranded at a gas station across the street from a Route 66 roadside attraction just outside of New Mexico. Dalton's Dinos is the kind of place you'd drive past and gawk at with an, "Aw, that'd be fun someday," before it slides from your mind forever. But Jordan's stuck here until a tow truck comes. And it's chilly out. So he heads inside.
When he enters, the place is stuck in between states — abandoned at first glance, but the lights are on and the attractions are active. Dinosaur skeletons are displayed and lit beautifully. Signs still read out fun facts about the dinosaur relics when you smack the big buttons. Miscellaneous merchandise depicting the attraction's friendly mascots is strewn about. After watching a fun FMV museum intro video, you're let loose into the attraction, where you see another living being off in the distance. A man in some big costume off in the distance lingers and then vanishes at your prompting.
Curiosity gets the best of you and suddenly you're set for the kind of night that's going to change your life forever.
Jordan is an agile college kid, maybe on an athletic scholarship, because you navigate Dalton's Dinos by mantling, leaping, and running across the precarious structures that have been left behind. When power to a part of the facility gets faulty and stops you from chasing down this strange mascot, you climb fake trees, crawl over dinosaur animatronic models, and flip some switches in the employee-only rafters. It's a parkour-first horror experience that calls on your agility to be able to dodge dangers and make your way through this strange amusement park-like world.
"I love movement-based games," Gelardi told us after our demo session. "Mirror's Edge, huge inspiration. But there's kind of a weightiness to those DICE games that we wanted to lighten and tighten up. So it's almost more like a Call of Duty, Overwatch, or Counter-Strike in its tightness and mobility."
It's in that last line that I found a ton of comparison to latch onto, as the floatiness of mobility brought me back to the days of trying to understand CS_Surf maps back in the 2010s. And that floaty feeling is more than just nostalgia; it kind of bakes in a little greater accessibility for those who aren't as platforming savvy, allowing you to be able to course-correct midair if you overshoot a platform. You've got coyote time — the famous classic cartoon-inspired mechanic that Celeste employed, giving players an extra second or two after leaving a platform to launch a jump — and generous mantling to ensure you're not punished too much when you're just trying to get a handle on things.
As our VGG duo has got representation at both ends of the platforming skills spectrum, we appreciated how approachable the toolset is.
"As people get further into the game, if they're newer, they'll build a skillset over time to be able to latch onto our more complex mechanics and use that floatiness for micro-adjustments. On the flip side, the skilled player will be able to maximize everything around the aerial control. They'll be able to use that nuance to get around corners to access shortcuts and stuff like that," said Gelardi.
Doing just that, I dug deeper into the facility, leaping over barriers and into parts of the building that no mere visitor was ever meant to see. Children's scribbles in a backroom, costumes hung in an employee locker room, and the various states of destruction that await the further we go in made the hairs on my neck stand on end.
This is a creepy place but one that feels uniquely authentic in a way that elevates that horror even more. From the purposefully corny acting in a recorded theater presentation to the practical lighting effects in the tunnel that "transport" you back to the dinosaur era to the pitch-perfect parody posters tucked away in the corners of the building, Dalton's Dinos feels like a realized place.
Eventually, to end the demo on a high-octane note, I found myself chased down some narrow halls by some snarling horror, sliding, jumping, and climbing my way past obstacles. I envision chases will be a big part of Terrible Lizard's horror, a test of the parkour skills you've accumulated in each chapter.
At the end of the chase, I finally tracked down our mascot pal... only to find the costume empty on the floor of a room that opens out into some natural caves under the building. Tentatively approaching a hole in the wall ahead of me, I came face to face with a horrifying dino monstrosity that, when it finally unleashed its haunting howl and opened its maw, made it clear this isn't just any regular dinosaur attraction, and these monsters aren't your textbook dinos.
The demo comes to an end and we're ravenous for more. WDR Studios is crafting an experience that pulls from horror classics, horror trends, and even the least likely spaces for horror with the likes of Counter-Strike and Call of Duty fueling their mobility concepts.
It's a fresh take on horror that asks you to hit the gas, creating an adrenaline-fueled horror experience that's all about perpetually moving forward and outrunning the danger on your heels. And it's re-energizing that childhood wonder (tinged with fear) that we had when thinking about these creatures that once walked the Earth.
It's an incredibly interesting project and one we can't wait to see more of when it releases in late October, just in time for some Halloween scares.
"I think dinosaurs are underserved. I'm excited to, as a fan of dinosaurs, put more dinosaur media out in the world," Gelardi summarized as we wrapped up our conversation. "It's the first game for many of the people on our team and everyone's loving it," he said of the PAX crowds that swarmed the perpetually busy booth.
To keep up with Terrible Lizards, wishlist it on Steam and give its demo a try, or follow WDR Studios' YouTube channel to see their development updates.
Check out more of our past coverage direct from the PAX West show floor for other hands-on game previews and interviews with developers.
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