Deathground (upcoming video game)

Deathground is an upcoming survival horror video game by developer and publisher Jaw Drop Games. A Kickstarter campaign was launched in July 2020 to help fund the game, which is being developed for Windows. It received an early access release on Steam on 7 October 2025.

Deathground is a survival horror game played from a first-person perspective.^[1] Players take on the role of humans who must fight for survival against dinosaurs while navigating through various environments and facilities.^[2] The game has six character classes, and it can be played solo or as a co-op game with up to four players total.^[3] Players must search and investigate the environment in order to complete objectives and acquire resources for survival.^[2] The game features several dinosaurs, including Compsognathus, Utahraptor, Allosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex, Brachiosaurus, and Triceratops.^[4][5][6]

Deathground was announced in July 2020,^[7] and had been in development for more than six months by Jaw Drop Games,^[8] a British indie game developer.^[9] Progress up to that point was self-funded.^[8] The game's announcement was accompanied by a trailer and the launch of a Kickstarter campaign to raise additional funding.^[7] Jaw Drop Games quickly reached its financing goal,^[10][11] and periodically released new images and trailers as development continued.^[12]

Gaming outlets favorably compared Deathground to the Jurassic Park franchise and the video game Alien: Isolation (2014).^[9][8][13] The latter was acknowledged as a source of inspiration, as well as other games such as Dino Crisis (1999) and GTFO (2021). The film Jurassic Park (1993) also inspired the development team.^[2] Ryan Scott of Fangoria wrote about Deathground in 2023, after seeing a new trailer, that it "looks like the Jurassic Park video game we've deserved for a long, long time."^[14] Writers for PCGamesN also believed that Deathground could fill the void left by the Dino Crisis series, dormant since 2003.^[9][15]

The development team sought to ensure paleontological accuracy, for instance by including feathered dinosaurs such as Utahraptor,^[7] although feathers can be toggled off if desired.^[16] Deathground is being developed with Unreal Engine 5.^[12] The game's composer is David Housden.^[17]

Deathground was originally planned for an early access release on Steam in the third quarter of 2021,^[8] to be followed by a full release the next year.^[18] However, the game missed both dates as development continued.^[1][19] A new trailer debuted in March 2025, with the early access release scheduled for later in the year,^[17][20] eventually occurring on October 7.^[21]

• Official website