Gary Napper Guides The Lost Wild to PS5 in 2027 — Annapurna Interactive
annapurna interactive is bringing The Lost Wild to PS5 in 2027, with Great Ape Games positioning it as survival horror built around observation, instinct, and restraint. Gary Napper, the game director at Great Ape Games, says the player does not fight dinosaurs; instead, they survive around them.
“What it takes to design dinosaurs as animals, not monsters.” That framing is the project’s clearest signal. Napper also said, “It’s great to finally be talking about The Lost Wild, a game where you don’t fight dinosaurs. You survive around them.”
Napper’s horror logic
The player is not equipped to kill the creatures in The Lost Wild, although tools do exist for defense. Rather than giving enemies exaggerated weak points or predictable attack patterns, the game pushes players toward evasion, hiding, distractions, and using the environment to get out alive. That keeps the encounter design closer to survival horror than power fantasy, and it gives the PS5 version a clear identity before release.
Napper said his experience working on Alien: Isolation has inevitably shaped how he approaches horror design. That matters here because the game is not selling a combat loop; it is selling pressure, uncertainty, and the kind of restraint that turns every encounter into a decision instead of a brawl.
Saskia on the island
Saskia explores an island filled with dense, claustrophobic, and unforgiving spaces, including abandoned buildings embedded in an overgrown wilderness. The story is designed to be discovered rather than force-fed, so the environments do the heavy lifting while players piece together traces of what happened there and why it was abandoned.
The dinosaurs are framed as believable animals with their own instincts, behaviors, and drives, which keeps the island from reading like a standard monster arena. That design choice leaves the player reading movement, sound, and terrain instead of waiting for a scripted boss pattern to break open the action.
2027 on PS5
2027 is the only release window attached to The Lost Wild, so the immediate takeaway for PS5 players is simple: this is a survival horror project still in the long lead-up phase, but its creative rules are already set. The promise is less about spectacle than about how the game will force players to move, hide, and interpret danger before the dinosaurs get close enough to matter.
For now, the crucial detail is the design stance. If The Lost Wild holds to that “animals, not monsters” approach, then the game’s success on PS5 will hinge on whether its stealth and environmental storytelling can make restraint feel as urgent as combat usually does.
