The Turok game franchise, which began as a violent and intense shooter for the N64, is returning in 2019 as an intensely cute isometric action title.
Dubbed Turok: Escape From Lost Valley, this upcoming project is about as far from the original Turok games as you can without turning the series into a mobile puzzle game. This new title features the same “human vs. dinosaurs” concept of the original games but abandons pretty much everything else that those games represented.
How did this bizarre new Turok title come about? Well, it was first submitted as part of the 2018 Universal GameDev Challenge. That competition saw various developers use the Unity engine to create projects based on Universal-owned properties. Developer Pillow Pig Games submitted Escape From Lost Valley as a Chibi-style take on the Turok franchise.
While Escape from the Lost Valley didn’t win that particular competition (that honor went to the strategy game Voltron: Cubes of Olkarion), Universal Studios Interactive Entertainment was impressed enough with the project to agree to acquire and distribute it.
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Interestingly, Escape From the Lost Valley may stray far from the style of the classic N64 Turok shooters, but it sticks close to the original Turok comics that those games were based on. Just like those comics, Lost Valley will focus on Turok and his brother Andar as they attempt to escape a world filled with dinosaurs. We even see a screenshot in which the pair refer to dinosaurs as “honkers;” a term that they used in the original comics.
Turok: Escape from Lost Valley is set to release for PC via Steam on July 25. There’s no word regarding a console port or Epic Store availability at this time.
Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.