Not terrible, just not quite terrific.
Terrible Lizards is a first-person horror parkour game and the debut title from WDR Studios, a brand new indie studio founded by the creators of JT Music, the YouTube channel best known for its video game inspired songs. It launches on October 29 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and if you’ve seen even a single trailer, the Five Nights at Freddy’s comparisons are pretty much unavoidable. Swap the haunted pizzeria for a dusty roadside dinosaur park, throw in a healthy dose of wall running, and you’ve got the general idea.
You play as Jordan, a college student road-tripping down Route 66 in 1992 on his way from Chicago to Los Angeles. Naturally, his car gives up on him in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico, leaving him stuck at a deserted gas station with a long wait ahead for the tow truck. Luckily (or not), right across the road sits Dalton’s Dinos, a once must-see dinosaur attraction that’s half museum, half theme park. And like any good horror protagonist, Jordan doesn’t just sit in his car and wait it out. He heads over looking for help, ends up in contact with a park employee called Stella who needs him to find the owner and his young son, and from there he gets dragged deeper and deeper into a place he really should have stayed away from.
The opening chapter is where Terrible Lizards is at its best, and honestly where I felt the game was really onto something. The attraction itself is really well put together, packed with detail and full of that slightly off, faded roadside charm that makes you feel like you shouldn’t be there. The first encounter with the “enemy” is well handled and genuinely creepy, and the parkour feels great from the very first jump. Movement is smooth, fluid and responsive, and for that whole first chapter I was having a really good time. It’s the kind of opening that gets you excited for what’s coming next.
In terms of length, you’re looking at around 6 hours if you blast through it. You’re unlikely to get stuck at any point, as there aren’t really any puzzles to speak of. Some of the more open areas ask you to track down a fuse, a key or some dynamite to get things moving again, but nothing that will have you scratching your head for long. If you take your time and go after all the collectibles that fill in what happened at Dalton’s Dinos, you can easily add another 2 hours or more on top of that. So while it’s not a huge game, it’s not necessarily the shortest one either.
At the end of chapter 1 you leave the attraction behind and head down into the caves underneath it. Cool enough, and it could have been interesting, but it really wasn’t. For the most part it’s one long, linear passage through bland environments, mostly brown rock walls and the odd mining cart, broken up every now and then by a semi-open area where you press a button or grab a fuse, jump around a bit and move on to the next, very similar area. The objective might as well have read “Continue through the cave” for the entire stretch. With only four chapters in the whole game, having two of them play out like this was a real letdown. They also drag on a little. Normally more game isn’t something I’d complain about, but when it’s this repetitive, I was mostly just waiting for it to be over.
Chapter 4 follows the same basic structure, but the environment is at least a bit more interesting to look at, which helps. Still, if I’m being honest, the first chapter is the only one I truly enjoyed from start to finish, with the rest of the game having its moments rather than holding up all the way through.
The parkour itself is a bit of a double-edged sword. Let me be clear, the movement is genuinely top notch. There are plenty of AAA games out there that could only dream of feeling this smooth, and it’s easily the most impressive thing about Terrible Lizards. The problem is what the game actually asks you to do with it. Most of the time it boils down to wall running, swinging and jumping, and not a whole lot more. Combine that with the dull environments and simple layouts that make up most of the game and it starts to feel repetitive pretty quickly. Great movement can carry a game a long way, but it needs interesting spaces to play in, and outside of the attraction those spaces just aren’t there often enough.
The horror side of things follows a similar path. It starts off strong in the attraction, where the abandoned theme park setting does a lot of the heavy lifting, but it fades pretty quickly once you head underground. The caves simply don’t give off those horror vibes, and the more you encounter the monsters, the less tense those moments become.
There’s no combat at all, which is completely fine for this type of game. Instead, the enemy encounters, of which there aren’t that many, come in two main types. The first has you running around a semi-open area trying to collect a handful of items while staying away from whatever is hunting you at the same time. These can get a little annoying, especially in the caves where there isn’t much atmosphere to build tension, so they end up feeling more tedious than scary. The second type is the straight-up chase sequence, and these were probably the most fun I had with the game. Being chased through tight, linear corridors while chaining parkour moves together is exactly where the movement gets to shine, and those moments were genuinely cool. I just wish there had been more of them.
Now, I know this is a small team and their very first game, so I don’t want to be overly harsh, and there are good things here. The concept behind Terrible Lizards is genuinely unique and interesting. A roadside attraction overrun by mutated dinosaurs is a fresh spin on the mascot horror formula, and some of the dinosaur monsters are really cool. It’s just a shame that the encounters with them end up feeling more routine than frightening as the game goes on, because the designs themselves deserved better moments to show them off.
As for the voice acting, it’s fine overall, though Jordan’s emotions seem to be all over the place, and his reactions don’t always line up with what’s actually happening around him. Not to mention the script leans on plenty of those typical dumb horror movie lines that have you rolling your eyes more than anything. On a more positive note, it was kinda nice to see MatPat from The Game Theorists pop up in a cameo as one of the side characters, and JT Music’s own Christian Ames plays park owner Dalton Coolidge in the live-action footage, which is a fun nod to the studio’s YouTube roots.
Then there are the bugs. I’m not going to hammer the game too hard on this one, since I played it before launch and I’d fully expect a day one patch to sort out most of them, but my playthrough had plenty of them. Hopefully that won’t be the case for anyone picking it up on release day.
So where does that leave Terrible Lizards? It makes a great first impression, it has a strong concept and its movement genuinely punches well above its weight, but it’s held back by a long middle stretch that overstays its welcome and a structure that rarely changes things up. If you’re into the whole horror attraction thing like Five Nights at Freddy’s but want a bit more platforming and movement in the mix, you’ll definitely get some enjoyment out of it, especially for the price. It’s set at $24.99, with a launch discount bringing it down closer to $20 for the first few days, and it’s also on Xbox Game Pass from day one, which makes it an easy one to try. If you’re after something deeper or more complex, though, you probably won’t find it here. As a debut, it shows real potential, and I’m genuinely curious to see what WDR Studios does next.
