The key art for Lone Pine draws you in with Izzie, an aspiring photographer, shown holding her camera, and a mysterious creature looming over the hills in the background. It’ll grab your attention as you scroll past the teaser trailer below, and it did mine with the booth and demo it had at PAX AUS 2025.

Narrative-heavy games are hard to demo, but I felt this short experience gave a good idea of the type of game that Lone Pine is setting out to be. I played on the Steam Deck, and the narrative-adventure gameplay was a solid showcase of genre staples and some new ideas.

After walking through the first section, Izzie makes her way into the forest, where she’s looking to find proof of ‘Cryptids,’ some mythical creature said to exist in Lone Pine. She makes her way up the mountain a bit and discovers an abandoned research camp, along with a car, gear, and more. The first puzzle involves breaking into the laptop to retrieve the clues it contains, which will help Izzie on her journey. This part involves finding a cipher and then deciphering the correct four-digit code for the laptop, and it felt good to solve the puzzle, although it wasn’t overly complex.

The demo ends shortly after this, but not after Izzie manages to get her camera on a creature she believes to be the mysterious Cryptids, and you must do a camera mini-game that involves getting the correct shutter speed and exposure to get a clear picture. It was probably the hardest photography section I’ve done in a game in ages, but it was nice to have something that wasn’t just “press button to take photo.”

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Alongside the art direction, which I really liked, the game already had great voice acting for Izzie, which added a lot to the experience and helped make it feel more cinematic and larger than the budget, I’m sure it has.

The short demo for Lone Pine was a tantalising tease for the whole game, and also a planned early 2026 demo on Steam, which should offer more insight into what this narrative has to offer and where it’s going.

[Explosion Network attended PAX Australia 2025 with a provided Media Pass.]