Stretch Your Legs with Some Parkour Horror In the Demo for Terrible Lizards

It's always a pleasant surprise when a game you'd never heard of just pops out of nowhere and manages to impress. Terrible Lizards is a horror parkour action game set inside Dalton's Dinos, a goofy American dinosaur-themed highway tourist trap that might have unearthed something strange, scaly, and cranky in the caves beneath the attractions. And now they're chasing you. Might want to consider running to download the demo and give it a try for yourself.

So, what you're getting here is a gorgeously detailed bit of first-person platforming, with the demo split into two scenes. One is the intro from the full game, giving you some tutorial-level challenges and your first brief chase sequence, introducing the first of several monsters - some kind of strange mutant dino-beast that's smart enough to wear one of the park's mascot costumes as a disguise. The latter half of the demo seems set further into the game, with an even larger focus on exploration and platforming, culminating in a surprisingly cinematic sequence where you're racing against a much larger, more destructive creature.

It's cheerfully campy creature feature stuff, with little to no gore (so far at least) and some decent voice performances. There's even a bit of live-action FMV stuff at one point, delivering a decent–if cheerfully hammy–performance from the out-of-his-depth showman who runs the attraction. It's all rather Goosebumps by way of the original Jurassic Park, with a nice sense of adventure so far, and responsive, snappy parkour controls that'll have you swinging from monkey bars and sliding through rapidly closing doorways in no time.

Pulling of some switches for some light puzzling aside, the running and jumping here is the focus, alternating between navigation puzzles (where you're free to take your time) and the obviously less-free chase sequences. If I had to provide one bit of critique of Terrible Lizards, it's that the two chases in the demo, while cool and full of nice little details, often have weirdly binary fail states. Crouch to get under a door instead of sliding? Instant failure, but at least you get a death animation. The second part of the demo just hits you with a 'RETRY?' screen if you divert at all from the intended path.

It's not experience-ruining, but it does break the illusion somewhat. While I'd like to see that improved, I'd be surprised if it happens between now and the game's full launch. Terrible Lizards is dropping just in time for Halloween, on October 29th. Give the demo a shot, or slap it on your wishlist here. The game is developed by WDR Studios and published by Digital Pajamas & Behavior Interactive.