Image: WDR Studios, Digital Pajamas & Behavior Interactive

While genuine under-your-skin scares are all well and good, Halloween needs some goofy, family-friendly thrills here and there, and you can't get much goofier than roadside tourist traps and enthusiastic FMV bits. We quite liked the demo for spooky parkour platformer Terrible Lizards when it surfaced last month (which somehow feels like forever ago), and now the full version has risen from the tar pits to menace the human world.

Developed by new outfit WDR Studios and co-published by Behavior Interactive (yes, the Dead by Daylight studio), Terrible Lizards is an exploration and parkour game about being trapped at Dalton's Dinos, a surprisingly massive museum complex located out in the middle of nowhere on a long American desert highway. Part family amusement center, part semi-illicit archaeological dig site and research facility. Y'know, standard weird horror stuff.

Despite looking like it might be yet another mascot horror story, the game quickly drops the pretense a few scenes in. The mascot suits are just what the smaller weird reptilian monsters lurking in the halls have disguised themselves as in order to blend in a bit better, but they're much better at chasing you down once they're out of costume. And there are much bigger things lurking in the depths.

There's no combat here. This is a pure 'spooky critters chasing you' kinda deal, but you're highly agile, able to slide, sprint, swing from overhead bars, and wall-run short distances. Hardly realistic, but neither are mutant lizard-beasts lurking out in the American desert. It's all a bit Mirror's Edge, only instead of cops following you, it's clawed monsters that immediately send you back to the nearest checkpoint if they grab you. No getting fangoriously devoured here - this is teen-friendly horror.

It's not all fleeing for your life, either. Each area introduces you to the environment and lets you explore, solve basic puzzles, and uncover bits of story before dino-dookie hits the fan. But once you're locked in, there's little margin for error. You've got to hit each jump and slide near perfectly, which I can see causing some frustration if you're not quick on the draw with first-person controls.

Both the monsters and the environments are great to look at. While this obviously isn't a mega-budget AAA production, the environments are very detailed, gorgeously lit, and packed full of lots of little incidental signs, inspirational posters, and little bits of voicework and video that you'd expect from a goofy (if surprisingly large) tourist sideshow. While I don't expect this level of detail to carry all the way into the later, more underground segments of the adventure, I've got my fingers crossed.

From the little I've played of the full game (I'd been hoping to cram in more time, but this week is PACKED), it feels a little more polished and refined than the demo, with a significant amount of extra FMV too. Rather than throwing you straight into the action, the full game hits you with the full paying customer treatment, introducing you to the owners of the museum and their animated mascots. Not far from the kind of thing I'd expect to see in a Goosebumps episode, honestly.

Hopefully I'll be able to carve out a bit more time for it myself to see how the rest of the game pans out, but for now, Terrible Lizards is out now on Steam for £22.50/$25, with a 20% launch discount running until November 5th. There's also a little extra discount to be had if you own Dead by Daylight, along with half of the rest of the internet.