Dinosaur Forest

I want to be honest with you the way a friend would be at a yard sale: sometimes the thing that costs almost nothing is priced that way for a reason, and Dinosaur Forest is about as transparent as a game gets on that front. It is a first-person wave shooter where you stand in an environment, basic weapons in hand, and watch dinosaur enemies charge straight at you with the tactical sophistication of a runaway shopping cart. Raptors, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and the obligatory T-Rex all make appearances, but their ambition ends at running in a straight line. The enemy AI is effectively non-existent, and players have pointed out that opponents regularly hover slightly above the ground and snag on the smallest geometry. If you came here for a combat challenge, you will find none. The game does carry a story mode of sorts, framing the whole thing around a character named Prince Kronoss on some kind of philosophical journey on an Unknown Planet. The voice acting is the kind that inspires genuine affection in certain circles, not because it is good but because it commits fully to its own strangeness. Community sentiment has been divided and largely honest about this: some players find the broken-toy quality genuinely endearing in short bursts, while others see it as a waste of even minimal time. The Steam review pool lands in mixed territory around 57 percent positive from several hundred reviews, which tells you this is a game that works for a specific type of person and not really anyone else. What does work, in the narrowest sense, is the co-op. Bring a friend into this chaos and the session transforms from a solo act of patience into something you can laugh about together. The cross-platform multiplayer support is a small genuine plus, and full controller support means you can slouch through the waves without a keyboard. The achievements are plentiful to the point of parody, reportedly all unlockable within twenty minutes, which suggests the developer had a philosophy about completionist satisfaction that most designers would not endorse. I cover games that nobody writes about, and Dinosaur Forest earns its place in that category. It is not handcrafted in the way that moves me. There is no intentional pacing to defend, no soundscape worth describing slowly, no pixel art to appreciate. What it is, is a curiosity: a time capsule of early-access indie FPS development from 2017 that somehow landed a large enough owner count to keep a small daily player count ticking years later. If you are a collector of strange Steam artifacts, a person who finds joy in deliberately rough games with a friend on a slow afternoon, or someone chasing a fast achievement card drop, there is a narrow lane here. Everyone else should spend those minutes on something with more craft behind it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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