Terrible Lizards: Best PC Settings, Specs and Controls

Terrible Lizards launched on October 29 for PC, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5, and WDR Studios built the whole game around one idea: you can run, jump, climb, wall run, bounce and slide, but you can never fight back. Before you boot it up, it helps to know exactly what your PC needs to run it, how the traversal system is actually wired together, and what the game does and doesn't tell you in its menus.

01What You're Installing: Premise and No-Combat Design

Terrible Lizards is a first-person horror game set at Dalton's Dinos, a fictional Route 66 roadside attraction in 1990s New Mexico. Your car has broken down, the staff have vanished, and a voice on an old payphone asks for help finding a missing child while something far worse stalks the exhibit halls below. WDR Studios has been explicit that there are no weapons and no combat option anywhere in the game — every encounter with one of the attraction's creatures is resolved by outrunning it, not fighting it.

That design choice is why the settings and controls actually matter more than usual. There's no gear score, no loadout, and no difficulty slider to fall back on if the traversal controls feel unfamiliar — your movement is the entire combat system, your defense, and your win condition. Getting your frame rate stable and understanding how the momentum model works before you meet your first creature is closer to "learning the controls of a fighting game" than "tweaking graphics options in an open-world RPG."

02System Requirements: What You Actually Need

WDR Studios' Steam listing splits requirements into two tiers. The minimum spec asks for Windows 10 (64-bit), an Intel Core i5-6400 or AMD Ryzen 3 1200, 6 GB of RAM, and a GeForce GTX 1050 2GB or Radeon RX 560 2GB on DirectX 11. That's a genuinely low bar for a 2026 release, which tracks with a first-person platformer that leans on fast traversal over heavy environmental detail.

The recommended tier is a bigger jump: Windows 11, an Intel Core i3-10100F or Ryzen 3 3100, 12 GB of RAM, and a GeForce RTX 2080 or Radeon RX 6800 XT on DirectX 12. Storage is 25 GB either way. If your card sits between those two tiers, expect to run at native resolution with some settings trimmed rather than a clean 1080p/60 out of the box — WDR Studios hasn't published a specific framerate target for either tier, so treat that as a reasonable expectation rather than a confirmed number.

03How the Momentum System Actually Works

This is the part the store page doesn't spell out, and it's the single most useful thing to understand before your first chase. In an October 27 PlayStation Blog post, studio and game director John W. Gelardi explained that Terrible Lizards runs on a fixed-speed movement model rather than the acceleration curves most first-person games use.

“Instead of having to run and jump, your momentum carries forward, so you can just jump and stay moving.”John W. Gelardi, Studio Director and Game Director, WDR Studios

In practice, that means you're already at top speed the instant you start moving — there's no ramp-up to manage. Jumping doesn't interrupt that speed either: momentum carries through the jump, so chaining a sprint into a leap into a wall run doesn't cost you pace the way it would in a game with jump deceleration. Gelardi also confirmed the game gives you aerial control, letting you nudge your trajectory mid-air to correct an overshot jump before you land short of a ledge.

That fixed-speed design is also why the traversal reads as "intuitive to learn, hard to master" in WDR Studios' own marketing copy. You don't need to manage acceleration, so the skill ceiling comes from reading the environment fast enough to chain run, slide, wall run and bounce without breaking your line while something far larger is closing the gap behind you.

04Controller Support and Platform Notes

Terrible Lizards ships with full controller support on Steam, confirmed directly on its store page alongside Steam Achievements and Family Sharing. WDR Studios hasn't published an official keybinding chart for either mouse-and-keyboard or controller layouts, so if you want to remap anything specific, check the in-game options menu after launch rather than relying on third-party keybind lists — none have been verified against the shipped build.

Steam Deck compatibility isn't confirmed one way or the other as of launch. Given the low minimum spec, there's a reasonable chance it runs, but WDR Studios and Valve haven't issued a rating, so don't assume Deck Verified status until one appears on the store page.

Terrible Lizards is developed by WDR Studios and published by Digital Pajamas, with Behaviour Interactive also credited on the release. Coverage ahead of launch noted it arrived as a day-one addition to Xbox Game Pass alongside its PC and PlayStation 5 releases, which is worth knowing if you'd rather try it through a subscription before committing to a purchase on Steam.

05Accessibility and Language Options

The Steam listing confirms subtitle support across ten languages — English, French, Italian, German, Spanish (Spain), Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian and Simplified Chinese — with English carrying full audio support. That matters more than usual here: a lot of the game's story is delivered through found audio tapes and a mysterious voice on a payphone, so subtitles are doing real narrative work, not just covering dialogue you could otherwise skip.

Beyond subtitles, WDR Studios hasn't detailed dedicated accessibility options like colorblind modes, difficulty sliders or motion-reduction toggles. Since the game has no combat and no fail-state weapons system, the main accessibility lever you have is traversal skill itself — there's no easy-mode equivalent that changes creature speed or chase length that's been confirmed publicly.

06Graphics Settings: What's Confirmed and What Isn't

Here's the honest state of things at launch: WDR Studios has not published a breakdown of the in-game graphics menu — no confirmed list of resolution scaling, upscaling support (DLSS, FSR or XeSS), ray tracing toggles, or texture/shadow quality tiers. The jump between minimum and recommended GPU tiers (a GTX 1050 to an RTX 2080) suggests there's meaningful headroom to tune, but until the studio or a verified in-game menu shot confirms specific options, treat any third-party "best settings" list for this game as speculation rather than fact.

What you can do today: match your hardware against the two confirmed tiers above, and if you're near the minimum spec, grab the free Steam demo before buying the full game. It's built from the same engine and traversal systems, so framerate and stutter in the demo should be a fair proxy for how the full 25 GB install will run on your rig.

07Setting Up Your First Run

Setting Up Terrible Lizards on PC

1. 1Compare your CPU, GPU and RAM against WDR Studios' minimum (GTX 1050 / RX 560, 6 GB RAM) and recommended (RTX 2080 / RX 6800 XT, 12 GB RAM) requirements before you buy.2 min
2. 2The demo runs on the same engine and movement system as the full game, so it's the best way to judge real performance on your rig before committing to the 25 GB download.15 min
3. 3Full controller support is listed on Steam; plug in your gamepad before launch and check the in-game options menu for input prompts if it isn't auto-detected.2 min
4. 4Subtitles are available in ten languages, including English with full audio support — switch them on if you want to catch every detail from the game's audio-tape storytelling.1 min
5. 5Remember that speed is fixed once you're moving and carries through jumps — practice chaining a run into a slide or wall run in a safe area before a creature starts chasing you.5 min

08Should You Demo It First?

Given how little is officially documented about the settings menu, the free Steam demo is genuinely the best diagnostic tool available right now — more useful than any spec sheet. It uses the same first-person engine, the same fixed-speed movement, and the same traversal inputs you'll use in the full 25 GB release, so if it runs smoothly and the wall-run and slide inputs feel responsive on your setup, the full game almost certainly will too.

WDR Studios' June 2026 reveal trailer, showing the run-jump-slide-wall-run traversal system months before the October 29 launch.

WDR Studios' June reveal trailer above is still the clearest public look at the traversal system in motion, since no dedicated settings or controls trailer has followed it. For anything more granular than what's covered here, your best bet is the in-game options menu itself once you've installed either the demo or the full release.

If you do run into stutter or frame drops on launch day, start with the basics before assuming your hardware is the problem: update your GPU drivers, close overlay software like Discord or GeForce Experience while you play, and verify your game files through Steam if a download interrupted. None of those are specific to Terrible Lizards, but they're the fastest way to rule out the usual culprits before you start adjusting whatever graphics sliders the settings menu turns out to have.