Clawed: an abandoned dinosaur park, a convincing atmosphere, and a resemblance worth discussing

Some atmospheres work before you have played a minute, and this is one of them. An abandoned dinosaur park, torn-open enclosures, underground tunnels, aquatic areas, and something very large waiting behind a fence that no longer holds anything back. For anyone who grew up with Jurassic Park, that is a direct summons.

Which leaves the question you raise, and it is more interesting than it first appears.

What the game offers

Clawed is an action-adventure survival horror developed and published by Flatrock Games. You infiltrate Prehistoria, a dinosaur park that has seen better days, with a mission to complete and an obligation to get out alive.

The structure is classic for the genre and well filled: you cross varied biomes, solve puzzles in pure survival horror tradition, explore enclosures, tunnels and aquatic environments, and face predators including the Deinosuchus and the Spinosaurus.

Two modes are offered. Classic Mode corresponds to the original survival horror experience. Survival Mode adds hunger, thirst, dynamic weather, a full day-night cycle and random dinosaur encounters. That second option should provide the game's longevity, because it turns a scripted route into hostile terrain. Good news besides: all of it is playable in co-op.

The gate, the dinos, and the very pointed wink

Let us be honest: looking at that park entrance, we all had the same thought, and it involved the word lawyer. The dinosaurs are not exactly rigorous palaeontology but they are enormously Spielbergian, and the studio does nothing to clear up the misunderstanding.

That said, there is a rather elegant reason for the impression, and it more or less exonerates everyone. The 1993 film did not merely put dinosaurs on screen, it fixed the mental image of the dinosaur for three generations. Its oversized raptors, its lighting, its way of making a glass of water tremble became the default reference. As a result, any game staging cinema dinosaurs will inevitably resemble the film that invented that grammar. This is not plagiarism, it is a cultural dependency nobody escapes.

And a dinosaur park going wrong stopped being an original premise a long time ago. What is protected is the precise detail, a logo, a typeface, a musical theme. The rest belongs to everyone, like the dinosaurs themselves, which entered the public domain roughly sixty-six million years ago.

What to watch

The game is out today with no user reviews yet, hence the absence of a score here. Worth flagging immediately, it is offered in English only, which matters in a game built on puzzles and documents to read.

The unknowns belong to the genre. A survival horror rests entirely on tension, and therefore on predator behaviour: if the dinosaurs follow predictable paths, the fear evaporates within two hours. Survival Mode will also have to prove its hunger and thirst systems add pressure rather than chores, the classic pitfall of such grafts.

Still, the setting is there, and an abandoned park is one of the best playgrounds you can hand this genre. For a Jurassic Park fan the pull will be hard to resist. We simply advise waiting for the first reports before venturing into the enclosures.

No user reviews exist yet, so the score above is our assessment. It rewards an immediately effective setting and atmosphere, plus a promising Survival Mode, while accounting for the lack of a French version and the genre's major unknown, predator behaviour.