Review · no story spoilers
Terrible Lizards review
A parkour game that happens to be frightening, rather than a horror game with jumping in it. Eight out of ten, with two caveats that matter more than the number.
Verified October 31, 2026Game v1.0.9Reviewed on PC · 11 hours · v1.0.9
Buy it for the movement. Stay for the tapes.
One of the best first-person platformers of the year, wrapped in a horror game that is good rather than great. If you bounce off the controls in the first hour, you will bounce off the whole thing.
The short verdict
Terrible Lizards is WDR Studios' debut, and it does not play like a debut. The movement system has a clear point of view — momentum, chaining, no weapons — and the level design teaches it properly, one room at a time. That is a harder thing to get right than a scary corridor.
The horror is the weaker half. It is effective while you are being chased and fairly thin when you are not. The game knows this, which is why it keeps putting you in chases. The story, delivered through tapes and notes, is better than the moment-to-moment dialogue.
Scores
- Metacritic
- 78 — generally favourable, from 4 critic reviews
- Steam
- Very Positive — 87% of 208 reviews at launch
- Our score
- 8 / 10
- Consensus
- Parkour praised, pacing and bugs criticised
Scores read on October 31, 2026, roughly 48 hours after launch. Review aggregates move; treat these as a snapshot rather than a permanent verdict.
Movement and parkour
9/10
The reason to play it. Momentum feels earned.
Horror and atmosphere
8/10
Chase-driven rather than dread-driven, and better for it.
Level design
8/10
Strong teaching structure, uneven pacing in Level 2.
Story and characters
7/10
Good tapes, thin protagonist, one great ending.
Value at $24.99
8/10
6–10 hours with a real NG+ mode. Fair.
Launch polish
6/10
Patch 1.0.9 fixed a lot; some rough edges remain.
What works
The movement is the game
Every move has a purpose and none of them are filler. The wall run is the standout: it is the moment the game stops feeling like a horror chase and starts feeling like something you want to get good at. By Level 3 you are chaining climbs, wall runs and slides without thinking about them, which is exactly what a good platformer should produce.
Teaching without tutorials
Each room introduces one idea, tests it quietly, then tests it at speed with a dinosaur behind you. There is no tutorial pop-up explaining wall running; there is a wall, a gap, and a reason to cross it. That is confident design.
The tapes
Dalton's recordings are the best-written thing in the game. They start as marketing material and end as something much smaller and more honest, and the shift happens gradually enough that you do not notice it until it has already happened.
It respects your time
Six to ten hours for a first run, with no filler chapters and no live-service scaffolding. The NG+ modifiers are a genuine reason to replay rather than a checklist. At $24.99 that is a fair trade.
What does not
Level 2 is too long
The digsite-and-caverns level is roughly a quarter of the game and it has two difficulty spikes that stop the momentum the rest of the game builds. The second generator timer and the bunker keypad fetch quest are the two places where the design stops teaching and starts testing patience.
Horror needs the chase
When nothing is chasing you, the game is a museum with good lighting. The atmosphere is strong but the tension collapses between encounters, and the quiet sections rely on you caring about the lore more than the game earns in its first two hours.
Launch polish
Patch 1.0.9 fixed input locks, a collider bug after the boulder fall, and a fuse-counting problem in Level 3. It did not fix the reported plushie achievement bug. If you are sensitive to this kind of thing, waiting a patch or two is reasonable.
Jordan is thin
The protagonist talks a lot and reveals little. He is likeable enough, and Kellen Goff does good work with the material, but the emotional weight of the story belongs entirely to the Coolidges.
Who should buy it
Buy it if
- You liked Neon White, Ghostrunner or Dying Light's movement.
- You want a horror game with no combat and no inventory.
- You have Game Pass and an evening to spare.
- You enjoy mascot horror but want the horror to be the chase, not the lore.
Skip it if
- You get motion sick from first-person platforming.
- You want a story-first horror game with puzzles and downtime.
- You need combat or a way to fight back.
- You are put off by launch bugs and early achievement issues.
If you liked
- Ghostrunner — for the one-hit-death momentum platforming, minus the horror.
- Dying Light — for the parkour-as-survival loop, with far more combat.
- Poppy Playtime / FNAF-adjacent mascot horror — for the tone, though Terrible Lizards is much more of a platformer.
- Neon White — for the “learn the route, then execute it fast” pleasure.
Bottom line
Terrible Lizards is the rare debut that knows exactly what it is good at. It is a movement game, and the horror is the pressure that makes the movement matter. If you play it as a horror game you will find it thin; if you play it as a platformer with consequences, it is one of the better things you can buy this month.
Eight out of ten. Buy it on sale, or play it on Game Pass today, and give the controls an hour before you decide.