Everyone shut up: dinosaur with a sword demo just dropped
Dinosaurs with swords. Stop reading and go get the demo.
Around 2022, Jean Nguyen — @jeananimate on Instagram — started posting animations of dinosaurs wielding comically large weapons. Spinosaur with a buster sword, raptor with a katana, tyrannosaur with a head-mounted chainsaw. And every one of them fucking ruled.
In 2023, he teased a game and started a Patreon. Yesterday, a demo for Dinoblade dropped.
"Step into the role of a young Spinosaurus, wielding a colossal Great Sword forged from ancient power." As you explore, each biome has an Alpha, "defeat them, or be devoured." Dinoblade plays like a soulslike. You grind XP between save points by taking out other blade-wielding dinosaurs, allowing you to level up with new special moves and improved stats. And then you tackle a brutal boss fight to progress to the next area.
All set to an appropriately butt rock soundtrack.
Dinoblade is pretty janky around the edges, if I'm being honest. The world isn't exactly richly detailed, there're no tooltips in the menus, and controller support works, but none of the buttons are labelled. But you know what else? Dinosaurs. With. Swords.
Jank aside, Dinoblade feels pretty good to play. The controls are relatively tight and the combat is satisfying. Besides, so long as you've ever played a soulslike before (especially early Dark Souls), you don't really need a lot of explanation.
Dinoblade takes the "how cool is this?" premise of those early animation tests and delivers a solid demo. I can't wait to see what this game can become for its release sometime in 2026, when it will almost certainly be a GOTY contender solely on the fact that, and I cannot stress this enough, THE DINOSAURS HAVE SWORDS.