Clawed had a slam-dunk pitch. Drop you into an abandoned dinosaur theme park, let all the reptiles loose, and dare you to grab a flash drive before the authorities show up. It’s the kind of idea that sells itself. Then you actually play version 1.0, and you realize this thing probably should still be sitting in Early Access.
What’s Clawed All About?
Clawed is a horror survival shooter set in Prehistoria, an abandoned dinosaur theme park. A massive containment breach two days earlier left the island overrun by loose reptilian predators, and your job is to sneak in and grab a flash drive before authorities take over.
You play as Hudson, a trained operative sent in solo. His mission starts with him traveling across the sea by ship, only for a massive Megalodon attack to wreck it. Washing ashore with barely any supplies, Hudson pushes forward anyway. Vessel destroyed, odds impossible, he’s still determined to infiltrate the park and get the job done.
Along with the first-person and third-person shooting and the horror-survival mechanics, you get a big dinosaur theme park to explore, Classic and Survival modes, and online or LAN co-op for one to four players. It’s a PC game, so you’ll be picking it up on Steam.
A Theme Park Missing Its Dinosaurs
Live dinosaur theme parks were always a terrible idea. Just look at the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies. It’s cool in theory and it brings out the kid in all of us, but safety and ecological concerns are always lurking. For Clawed, the problems go way past that.
A dinosaur theme park should, well, have dinosaurs in it, especially one that’s supposedly overrun by them. You almost never run into the reptilian predators here. The place definitely gives off an abandoned theme park vibe, but it comes across less like a dinosaur sanctuary gone wild and more like a crime scene with blood-smeared floors and dead livestock.
The game is clearly an homage to classic dino movies in its setup and premise. What’s missing is the fear factor of dinosaurs, the action-packed sequences, and the heart-pounding stealth that made films in the genre so popular. That yanked me right out of the dino fantasy and left me just grinding through objectives.
Prehistoria Looks Great… Maybe Too Great
Prehistoria is a massive island split into distinct zones, each with a different tourist attraction. The rides and setups are exactly what you’d expect from a proper dino theme park. Honestly, if this place existed in real life, I’d buy a ticket in a heartbeat.
Cruising on the monorail is a highlight, giving you an awesome sense of the map’s scale. The dinosaurs look fantastic up close, with highly detailed textures, and their roars hit just right. The environmental audio really brings the park to life too: jungle tracks, rustling foliage, rain effects, and periodic PA announcements all build a great atmosphere.
Here’s the problem: that massive size works against you. Exploring makes you feel like an actual tourist, but the lack of roaming dinosaurs and the endless fetch quests make getting around eventually feel like a chore.
Most structures, like the water slides in the resort area, are just for show. You can’t interact with them, which is a total bummer. Honestly, I wish the devs had traded the giant map and decorative set pieces for a more condensed world packed with actual things to do.
The Pacing Is All Over the Place
Clawed opens with a well-crafted cutscene that sets a genuinely threatening tone. That atmosphere evaporates the moment actual gameplay kicks in. The initial objectives did a decent job of introducing the environments you’ll be exploring, but basically nothing happens during the first thirty minutes.
It took about forty minutes before I finally spotted a dinosaur in the wild, and even then it was just running off in the distance for a quick scare. By that point I actually wanted to chase after it rather than run away. I was just desperate to get a good look at a dinosaur in a game that’s supposedly about dinosaurs.
After a while I stumbled upon a save point I didn’t even realize the game had. From there, save points stayed frustratingly sparse, which is especially worrying for the harder areas ahead.
Then the game swung hard in the opposite direction and dumped a pile of repetitive objectives on me once I reached the main park. Without clear markers or instructions on what to do next, I had no idea where to start. Even clearing a single task in this huge park takes forever, and knowing the last save point you saw was ages ago just makes you more and more anxious.
Going straight from a slow, tutorial-paced crawl to a sudden overload of objectives threw me for a loop. There was zero buildup, and the core gameplay never evolved. It felt like the game threw in a bunch of extra fetch quests, added a pinch of dinosaurs, and said, “Here, go have fun, I guess.”
Horror Isn’t Just Jump Scares and Dark Rooms
Tagged as survival-horror, Clawed leans far more on jump scares than actual fear or tension. The sporadic, or downright nonexistent, appearances of dinosaurs do make each encounter shocking, more of a surprise really, but it’s a sudden jolt rather than genuine dread.
The dark lighting does help those jump scares land. It also becomes a nuisance fast, especially when you’re doing objectives in these pitch-black sections. I frequently had to pause the game and wait a few minutes to recover, since navigating these dimmed areas was so disorienting it gave me headaches throughout my playthrough. I guess that’s where the true horror of the game lies.
You do get a flashlight to light up small spots in these rooms, but it does little to help with navigation and hardly justifies why so much of the game is pitch-black. Scavenging for key items in the dark feels like a chore, made even worse by an interaction prompt that often fails to show up.
Honestly, the encounters with the savage dinosaurs themselves should’ve been scary enough on their own. Overusing dark areas as the places where these predators lurk just became predictable as the game went on.
It Feels Unfinished
Despite launching as a full 1.0 release, Clawed feels unpolished. The controls are janky, bugs show up constantly, and features are missing. Movement is especially restrictive: almost no verticality, short jumps, and barely any noticeable difference between walking and sprinting.
Combat is equally uninspired. It relies on standard shooter gameplay with no alternative tactics for dealing with threats, and even the current mechanics are botched. Tranquilizers that were supposed to be silenced still had the same sound effects as a regular pistol, which also attracted the dinosaurs.
I kept clipping through fences while hopping over them, and dinosaurs often phased through solid obstacles while chasing me. The enemy animations were just as clunky. Instead of sprinting, the raptors seemed to slide across the ground, making their turns look completely unnatural. Some of them will literally jump off a cliff, suddenly vanish, or just have their models glitch out entirely.
On top of that, the settings menu feels incomplete. The gameplay options tab literally states that these features will be added in a future update. The developers also promised a Tourist Mode at launch, where players can explore Prehistoria before the outbreak, and that currently isn’t in the game.
A Couple of Quick Answers
There are no difficulty options in Clawed at all. What you do get is two game modes, Classic and Survival, and the major difference is that Survival adds a hunger system and weather conditions. As for length, Classic mode takes about 10 to 12 hours to beat, and around 20 to 24 hours for a full 100% completion.
The Bottom Line: A Roaring No
The developers’ ambition is clear. Clawed just feels like a project where the studio bit off way more than it could chew. So much focus went into making Prehistoria look like an actual theme park that the gameplay took a massive backseat. The bare-bones combat, boring quests, and constant bugs just drag on, and Survival Mode honestly feels barely any different from Classic.
The horror elements don’t really deliver as advertised either, and the pitch-black areas, which were probably meant to add to the scary vibe, just end up being straight-up disorienting and a massive pain to navigate.
Clawed just lacks any real excitement or intensity, and that’s a huge problem when that’s usually what makes dino games, or dino media in general, so fun to play. Even with the devs promising future updates and more content down the line, the $19.99 price tag just isn’t worth it, even for hardcore dinosaur fans.
Final Verdict
Clawed delivers a below average experience with a score of 46/100.