Wilderdark: Monstrum’s makers trade a derelict ship for an island of infected dinosaurs

A decade ago, Junkfish made its name with a simple, cruel idea: lock the player inside a derelict cargo ship, reshuffle its corridors on every run, and set an AI-driven predator loose with nothing to answer it but a hiding place. Monstrum earned the Scottish studio nominations for Best Debut Game at the TIGA Awards and Best Game at the Scottish BAFTAs, and it rested on one design conviction: the player should never feel strong enough to fight back. With Wilderdark, Junkfish carries that helplessness out of the steel maze and into open jungle, and gives its monsters a far older set of teeth.

The premise is pulp with a biological edge. An ectoparasitic organism has taken hold of an unnatural island, warping both its dinosaurs and its plant life, and the player arrives as a field operative sent after nothing less than the source of immortality. The job is to document: photograph the ecosystem, collect samples, and piece together what happened to the expeditions that went before and never came back. One of them, the studio reveals, was led by the protagonist’s own parents, which turns a survey mission into an inheritance of dread.

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What makes it interesting is the verb Junkfish has chosen. Most dinosaur games hand you a rifle; Wilderdark hands you a camera. Stealth is pitched as the player’s greatest weapon, and the island’s apex predators hunt by sight and by sound, so every crossing of dense jungle, abandoned research camps and parasite-infested ruins becomes a negotiation with whatever can see or hear you. Photography doubles as progress, and tools are crafted from whatever the island leaves lying around. It is the Monstrum contract restated in a new ecology: you are the observed as much as the observer.

Founder and director Adam Dart frames the project around exactly that exposure. “We wanted to create an experience where the player feels genuinely vulnerable, where every sound could mean danger and every discovery raises more questions,” he said in the announcement, adding that putting dinosaurs into survival horror let the team explore that tension “in a way we haven’t done before.”

The game did not arrive cold. A Steam demo let players onto the island ahead of launch, and Junkfish kept revising it in response to their feedback: a full tutorial for mechanics and controls, reworked dinosaur designs and animations meant to make the creatures’ mood easier to read, and a long tail of quality-of-life fixes. That second change is the telling one. In a stealth game about predators, knowing whether an animal is curious or hunting is the entire grammar of play.

Wilderdark is out now on PC through Steam, priced at $17.99, £13.75 or €15.49, with a 20% launch discount running until November 17. Junkfish, which now works out of the UK and Singapore, calls it a return to the genre it helped shape. Whether a jungle can feel as airless as a ship’s hold is the question players can finally answer for themselves.

Tags: dinosaurs, survival horror games, Adam Dart, Junkfish, Monstrum, Wilderdark

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