I’ve taken a few peeks at Deathground since it was announced back in 2020: it’s a co-op survival horror game where up to four players sneak and creep through an abandoned research facility, being stalked by ravenous dinosaurs every step of the way.
It’s Jurassic Park simulator, in other words, where you try to complete objectives and escape the facility while the deadly T-Rex, the imposing allosaurus, those devious little compsognathus (compies), and of course, the fearsome raptors are nipping at your heels. (Or more accurately, are trying to chew you up and swallow you.)
I’m not sure why, but at some point I started assuming Deathground was a bit like Dead By Daylight, and that in addition to playing as humans trying to survive the facility, players could also take on the role of one of the dinosaurs for a bit of asynchronous PvP.
I’m not alone in that misconception: it’s apparently come up so often that the developers of Deathground put out a FAQ video before the game’s early access launch Tuesday to dispel that myth. One of the first questions in the video is “Can I play as a dinosaur?” And the answer, unequivocally, is no.
“Deathground is PvE, or player versus environment, so you won’t be able to play as a dinosaur,” says lead artist and designer Joseph Shirley of developer Jaw Drop Games. “We definitely think this is a really cool idea and we’ve had plenty of discussions about it as a team, but it’s a completely different game.”
That doesn’t mean it’ll never happen, though. “Maybe it’s something we can do at another time,” Shirley says. “Who knows what the future holds?”
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There’s something else that’s apparently come up often enough in the community to warrant a response in the FAQ: the presence of feathers on Deathground’s dinosaurs. Over the past several decades, more and more fossil evidence has supported the theory that dinosaurs were feathered, and it seems not everyone loves the idea of deadly dinos looking like giant birds instead of huge lizards.
Jaw Drop Games has a solution: there’s an option in Deathground to toggle off feathers entirely. I don’t really get the problem people have with feathered dinosaurs, personally: my neighborhood is full of huge, wild turkeys, and they can be pretty damn intimidating. If dinosaurs have feathers, I think that actually makes them cooler than lizards. Don’t you?
The video goes on to answer a few more questions about Deathground, such as which items are available for players to use during their missions, which include an Aliens-like motion detector and a tranquilizer rifle you can use to drop a dino in its tracks. Missions include tasks like restoring electrical power to the facility or dicier sounding quests like stealing a raptor egg from a nest. (I really wouldn’t do that if I were you.) The locations of objectives change between sessions so missions will be different each time you play.
And while you can’t play as a dinosaur, you can at least play solo as well as co-op. “The game is certainly more difficult when you go it alone,” Shirley says, but there are some balancing changes made in favor of the solo players, and you can revive without needing a teammate to help you if a dino gets its jaws on you. Deathground launches October 7 in early access on Steam.
