Life has once again found a way in Athanasia, an “immersive” dinosaur FPS that feels like comfort food for Dino Crisis and System Shock players alike

Good news, people who figure they are going to die of old age before they get another Dino Crisis! Good news also, people who can’t get enough throwback immersive sims! Even as Capcom forge ahead with their Resident Evil remake ouroboros, plucky Momentum Games and horror publishers Black Lantern Collective are releasing Athanasia – a first-person homage to both Dino Crisis and System Shock, in which you play intrepid researcher Carmen Flores, who has been sent to one of gaming’s many ominous abandoned scientific facilities in South America.

One of these days, I’m going to turf up to a collapsing laboratory complex in a game and discover nothing but stationery, old rubber gloves, and unfiled expense claims. I imagine a lot of laboratories are abandoned not due to (for example) gene-modded dilophosaurus outbreaks, but because the funders got cold feet long before Project X reached the prototyping stage. But that day is not this day. Today, there are dinosaurs! Argh, my face and/or intestines! Here’s a trailer.

As System Shockables go, this is playing the hits: gun-metal corridors with strip lighting and waist-high vents; hackable panels and inventories crammed with tools and craftable objects; audio logs and secret routes and much talk of [REDACTED] in the world-building. Hopefully, whatever [REDACTED] proves to be will introduce some novel flourishes. Could be the title is a hint: athanasia means “deathless”. Aww, say it isn’t just zombie dinosaurs, eh? The Steam page promises “a terrible truth and ancestral nightmares that have plagued us for longer than we have been human”.

The dastardly reptiles do not appear especially smart in the trailer, but then again, it’s a montage of killshots. It’d be nice if the velociraptors knew how to play decoy, at least.

Athanasia launches in early access today, with the full release expected sometime in 2027. The initial early access version will encompass three of six planned areas, with most of the enemy and item types. “Depending on community feedback and the pace of development, we may seek to add some additional areas, items and/or enemies beyond our current plans, but our main focus is to deliver what we’ve already promised,” the devs write on Steam.

If you need your imsim fix sooner, the recent RetroSpace is pretty solid. If you like your dinosaurs to have more animation cycles and skin nobbles, keep an eye on The Lost Wild – a plumper, shinier survival horror from a team including Alien: Isolation vet Gary Napper.