Clawed Preview: Jurassic Park Called, It Wants Its Nightmare Back
- Niels Gys
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
Clawed looks like the dinosaur survival-horror game people have been begging somebody to make properly. The good news is that its horror isn't just a T. rex standing moodily in some Steam screenshots. Exploration, scavenging, puzzles, firearms and genuinely dangerous dinosaurs form the actual gameplay. The bad news is that the full game hasn't launched yet, and its demo exposed enough rough edges that nobody should be polishing the review score before the gates open.
The premise barely needs selling.
You enter Prehistoria, an abandoned dinosaur theme park, on a covert mission. Naturally, the park is full of prehistoric animals that have developed strong opinions about visitors.
What follows is survival horror rather than dinosaur Call of Duty. You explore the park, search for resources, find keys and keycards, solve progression puzzles, open new areas and decide what to do when several tonnes of extinct wildlife appear without having booked an appointment.
There are plenty of games featuring dinosaurs. Very few understand that the interesting thing about meeting a dinosaur isn't necessarily shooting it 46 times while damage numbers fall out of its forehead.
It's being somewhere you absolutely should not be while something substantially higher on the food chain starts investigating the noise.
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Prehistoria Is the Main Attraction
The strongest thing Clawed has going for it is the park itself.
The demo establishes exploration as a major part of the experience rather than scenery connecting combat arenas. You're searching locations, finding equipment and figuring out how to progress with relatively little hand-holding.
That immediately gives the dinosaurs more power.
A velociraptor wandering into your route isn't merely Enemy Type B arriving for its scheduled combat shift. It's something occupying the same environment you're trying to investigate.
And that is exactly where dinosaur horror should live.
The abandoned-theme-park setup gives Clawed an obvious Jurassic Park flavour, but the gameplay leans into the part those films understood particularly well: humans are spectacularly unimpressive once the fences stop working.
You're not the apex predator.
You're a mammal with a firearm and paperwork.
Excellent.
Clawed also supports online co-op, so you can explore Prehistoria with somebody else and experience that wonderful cooperative-horror tradition where friendship lasts precisely until something enormous appears and both players independently decide the other person looks delicious.
The Dinosaurs Aren't Decorative
Most importantly, Clawed's horror fantasy appears mechanically legitimate.
Dinosaurs are threats you encounter while navigating the park. Firearms exist, but so does vulnerability. Resources matter. Progress requires exploration rather than simply exterminating everything between the entrance and the credits.
The full release will also include two approaches to the game.
Classic Mode delivers the conventional survival-horror campaign, while Survival Mode is intended to add hunger, thirst, dynamic weather, a day/night cycle and randomized dinosaur encounters.
That second mode could be particularly interesting because dinosaurs become much more frightening when encounters aren't simply memorized obstacles sitting between Keycard A and Door B.
But that's still something the finished game needs to prove.
Because Clawed's demo also showed where this entire operation could go horribly wrong.
If being hunted through the dark by something enormous sounds suspiciously relaxing, descend into CRIMENET's horror coverage next. We've already been opening doors clearly labelled DO NOT OPEN so you don't have to waste money discovering what was screaming behind them.
Please Stop Hiding Keys Everywhere
The biggest structural warning is progression.
The demo relies heavily on finding keys and keycards. Searching an abandoned dinosaur park is interesting. Searching one because apparently every employee at Prehistoria secured individual broom cupboards like they contained nuclear launch codes is less so.
There is a dangerous line between exploration and looking behind seventeen desks because Gerald from Park Security misplaced another rectangle.
Clawed needs the full game to stay on the correct side of it.
Players also raised concerns during the demo period about sparse environmental audio, inconsistent immersion, visibility, dinosaur animations and occasional progression problems.
Performance is the other large question mark.
The demo attracted reports of unstable framerates even on powerful PCs. Flatrock subsequently released optimization work, and some players reported improvement, but stuttering and performance complaints did not completely disappear.
That does not mean the finished game is badly optimized.
It means performance deserves scrutiny at launch.
There is a substantial difference between "the demo had optimization problems" and "the game has optimization problems," and we're not going to perform that little journalistic card trick merely because release day wants a dramatic headline.
So, Should You Be Excited About Clawed?
Yes, cautiously.
Clawed has already cleared the most important hurdle: the premise is real.
This isn't a generic action game wearing dinosaur pyjamas. The available gameplay supports exploration, resource management, environmental progression and dangerous prehistoric encounters as fundamental parts of the experience.
And there is something wonderfully straightforward about that.
No procedurally generated dinosaur empire requiring seventeen crafting benches.
No velociraptor battle pass.
No Tyrannosaurus demanding you collect 800 units of Legendary Wood before you can upgrade the toilet.
Just an abandoned park, things with teeth, and the growing suspicion that entering was perhaps not humanity's finest administrative decision.
What Clawed hasn't proven yet is whether that idea can sustain an entire game.
The full release needs to demonstrate that exploration remains interesting, dinosaur encounters remain threatening, progression doesn't collapse into endless keycard collection, Survival Mode adds meaningful pressure and the technical problems seen during the demo have been properly wrestled into submission.
If it manages that, Clawed could occupy a surprisingly underused corner of horror gaming.
Because somehow we've spent decades watching dinosaurs eat people in films while games repeatedly concluded that what everyone really wanted was another crafting system.
Clawed understands the better fantasy: sometimes you don't want to build a dinosaur park.
Sometimes you want to discover exactly why the previous owners abandoned it.
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