Video Game / Son and Bone

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Son and Bone is an open-world, fast-paced First-Person Shooter/survival game developed by Indie studio TeamKill Media, a small four-men company founded by the Jones brothers.

It's the Wild West, and Sheriff Sam Judge - the tough-as-nails player-controlled protagonist - is on the trails of Tusk, a notorious outlaw who attacked a farm and kidnapped an innocent girl, Violet. Tracking down Tusk with his hostage, Sam and the outlaw is in the middle of an intense standoff when a portal unexpectedly materializes, sending Sam, Tusk and Violet into an ancient prehistoric world during the age of dinosaurs.

Trapped in the middle of a death world, of course Sam isn't going down without a fight, especially when he comes across a cabin owned by weapons merchant Thunderstick who can provide Sam with multiple firearms and upgrades from different eras. Arming himself to the teeth, Sam decides to continue his search for Tusk and Violet with entire packs of dinosaurs in his way ready for slaughter.

The game was released in 2024 for the PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Windows. It could be seen as a sort-of successor to Turok, Dino D-Day and Second Extinction, but Bloodier and Gorier... much, much gorier with the onscreen gore, massacres and overkills delivered towards dinosaur enemies cranked off the charts. To the point where the game's onscreen violence straddles somewhere between Bloody Hilarious and achieving Nirvana.

Sam: I've promised them, I'll find Violet...

• Always Save the Girl: Sam is adamant to bring back Violet, even when he's stranded a few million years in the past - he emphasizes in a cutscene halfway through that Violet is his mission, no matter what.
• And Show It to You: One of Sam's (many) execution moves, specifically dished out to the dinosaur-humanoid mooks. He'll rip their skulls open, pull out a brain, and crush it with one hand before going back to fighting.
• Bad with the Bone: Right at the game's beginning, Sam realize he needs a melee weapon besides his revolver. He then yanks off the jawbone of a nearby dinosaur skeleton and uses that as an improvised hatchet - it's surprisingly useful for killing early enemies.
• Ballistic Discount: Subverted when Sam encounters Thunderstick the first time - noticing there's a fellow human in a cabin filled with guns Sam promptly grabs Thunderstick and holds him at gunpoint. But then Sam realized Thunderstick to be one of his only allies (where else can he get all those bigger and stronger guns?) and lets go, before paying for equipment in proper.
  Thunderstick: You can trust me, I've got guns!
• Big Bad: Tusk, a nasty outlaw Sam pursues in the prologue who's using Violet as a hostage before a time-warp interrupts the two men's standoff. Turns out Tusk was using alien time-travelling technology to his own gains, deliberately teleporting himself, Sam and Violet into the warp and throwing the other two to the dinos while he continues fusing alien, human and dinosaur DNA into himself to achieve Ultimate Life Form status.
• Body Armor as Hit Points: Sam can obtain body armor either from stages (presumably belonging to other time-displaced characters less fortunate than him) or buy them from Thunderstick. There's a separate meter for his armor level that can offset damage taken by Sam.
• Blood-Splattered Warrior: After killing a significant amount of dinosaurs in the first hour of gameplay alone, Sam gets increasingly splattered with red as he progresses and he's not even near the end. This actually translates into his POV where his hands and weapons are coated in dino blood.
• Camera Abuse: From Sam's POV, the camera will be constantly covered in blood, grime, scratches, dilophosaurus spit and assorted damage.
• Checkpoint: Campfires serves this purpose and can be accessed at the start of most levels, allowing Sam to sit down and save his progress. If he collected any food beforehand, he can also consume them for extra health.
• Colossal Croc: Deinosuchuses are a recurring threat in swamp and marsh-based levels, resembling larger versions of modern-day crocodiles that relentlessly try to chomp on you.
• Covers Always Lie: The poster on top of this page is mostly accurate, but it's alternate covers on the other hand:
  • One early cover art makes the player character, Sam, look older than he actually is in the game, with a whole beard covering his chin. He has a black mustache in the actual game.
  • Another implies the dinosaurs to be larger than they are in the actual game. And despite what was implied - no, at no point did the dinosaurs actually made it to present-day San Francisco.
• Coup de Grâce Cutscene: Taken to the extreme that Sam has at least a dozen different execution moves he can dish out on enemies, each and everyone with varying quantities of blood - between yanking out skulls, breaking jaws, blasting their heads off at point-blank range, stomping them into a pulp and the like, one might wonder if the Jones brothers were traumatized by Jurassic Park (1993) during their childhood and when they were adults, decide to make Son and Bone as a subtle form of revenge...
• Cyborg: All of the game's bosses - Vrontisaurus Rex, Mosasaurus, Tyfonasaurus, Drakosaurus Rex - are dinosaurs upgraded with cybernetic implants courtesy of Tusk dabbling with alien tech and has visible mechanical parts adorning their bodies. Later in the game there's also large dinosaurs with turrets grafted on their backs.
• Derelict Graveyard: There's a stage set in what appears to be an abandoned military depot filled with wreckage from different areas - World War era planes, modern-day tanks, an aircraft carrier, and even spaceships. Turns out those are pulled in from multiple time zones by Tusk.
• Dreadful Dragonfly: Alongside dinosaurs and hostile dino-men, Sam also needs to deal with oversized dragonflies who can damage him with stingers. The game doesn't seem to have a different insect-based enemy beyond these creatures.
• Dinosaurs Are Dragons: Drakosaurus Rex, the game's penultimate boss, from it's name and appearance, is a dinosaur-dragon-cyborg monstrosity looking more like something from a High Fantasy film. It breathes fire and has draconic wings allowing it to fly, of course.
• Elephant Graveyard: One of these shows up relatively early, being a boneyard of different dinosaur species strewn about. Sam can collect pickups between the piles of bones, and there are still-living dinosaurs around as well.
• Exploding Barrels: Occasionally there's red barrels in outdoor areas that explodes with generous proximity, useful for eliminating groups of dinosaurs or to target larger monstrosities. Some of them are actually plot-necessary, like blowing up a barrel to collapse a bridge.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Save for the brontosaurs and parasaurs, Sam won't be getting any allies in this game. Even stereotypically-docile herbivores (triceratops, pachysaurs, stegosaurs) and those rodent-sized compys will attack Sam on sight.
• Gatling Good: Sam can wield both a minigun and a WWI-era M2 Browning during gameplay, using them to mow down whatever's not on his side.
• Gentle Giant Sauropod: Somehow played straight with the brontosaurs (one of the few dinosaurs that doesn't attack Sam unless provoked). They tower absolutely over Sam and while they can be killed, these longnecks tend to ignore him.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: Sam's first futuristic weapon is a high-tech pistol that deals little damage, and its main purpose is to fire a laser-rope on hovering drones for Sam to swing around and reach outdoor areas.
• Go for the Eye: More than one of Sam's execution methods dished out on dinosaurs involves eye-gouging with a satisfying amount of accompanying red stuff. Including shoving a dynamite-stick butt-first halfway through a gorgosaur's eye and lighting the fuse, climbing on a triceratops' frill and yanking off a horn before stabbing the triceratops' eye, and digging two forefingers into both a pachysaur's cornea and yanking hard enough to rip off its head-plate.
• Gorn: Thrice per minute on average...
• Grievous Harm with a Body: More than one execution move - Sam can impale a triceratops through the eye with it's own horn, rip off a stegosaurus' dorsal plates and stab it to death, smash an ankylosaurus through the skull using it's own tail, pull out a spinosaur's fin and slice open the dinosaur's back and so on.
• The Greys: The aliens that abducts Sam, Violet and Tusk in the opening scene and sends them through a time-warp which turns out to be working in tandem with Tusk resembles the classic skinny, almond-eyed, pale-skinned greys. After spending majority of the game dealing with dinosaurs Sam takes on regular Grey enemies in the final level.
• Guns Akimbo: Sam has a revolver by default, and obtains another barely minutes into the first stage. And yes, of course he can use both at once against all those hostile dinosaurs and dino-humanoids. Later on when the game starts bringing in modern-day weaponry Sam can wield two Berettas akimbo.
• Headbutting Pachy: Pachycephalosauruses are another enemy type, serving as a herbivore counterpart to the velociraptors. Like most depictions in media they attack by ramming their thick foreheads at Sam and can knock Sam backwards by several meters on a direct hit; in fact Sam's execution move on these guys involves yanking out their head-plates!
• Healing Serpent: The game's health pickups are depicted as translucent blue caduceus symbols that increases a tiny bit of Sam's life if it isn't already full. Larger symbols with a cross boosts his health by half.
• Improperly Placed Firearms: Sam can use a wide range of anachronistic firearms from different eras, either collected from battlefields or purchased from Thunderstick whenever he enters a new area, ranging from old-timey revolvers and Winchesters to modern-day miniguns and assault rifles to futuristic high-tech blasters and pulse rifles. Justified because of the time-travelling setting where Tusk, in control of alien technology, is pulling in resources from different time zones.
• Instant Roast: Besides dinosaurs, Sam can somehow come across chickens running about in the game. Shooting them once turns them into an oven roaster that Sam can consume whenever he reaches a campsite for health.
• Intrepid Merchant: After his first meeting with Thunderstick, the gunsmith will magically appear ahead of Sam in most stages, setting up shop in the middle of a dinosaur-infested badland to sell new weapons to Sam. He'll introduce increasingly futuristic, high-tech armament as the game continues.
• Jawbreaker: One of Sam's execution moves against medium-sized carnivorous dinosaurs, grabbing them by both halves of their jaws as the dinosaur tries chomping on Sam before he yanks them open.
• Katana Superiority: Oh hell yes. After spending half the game with his dinosaur-jaw hatchet, Sam obtains a katana from some Japanese-looking ruins teleported through time by Tusk like so many other things in the game and as a melee weapon, the katana can deliver lightning-fast slashes and insane amount of damage easily. Sam's katana against a T-Rex, Spino or Gorgosaur? The katana wins.
• Lethal Lava Land: There are several stages set in volcanic caverns, or lava pools out in the open, that kills Sam if he falls into the lava. However they run on Convection, Schmonvection that he can straddle near the edges without getting hurt - there's in fact a few platforming areas that requires Sam to leap between multiple floating rocks or pillars on lava pools where despite the rising steam and overflowing molten lava, the only way he can get hurt is if he misses a jump.
• Lizard Folk: After dealing with the initial batch of hostile dinosaurs, Sam the faces dinosaur-humanoid monstrosities resembling savage natives with saurian heads. These enemies tends to have arm cannons grafted to their limbs and are among the few mooks with ranged attacks (the dilophosauruses aside).
• Made of Plasticine: This game contains the flimsiest dinosaurs in history, to the point where they literally fall apart mid-running when shot enough times. There's also how most of Sam's elimination moves involves pulling apart dinosaurs with his bare hands...
• Manly Facial Hair: Sam has that thick Wild West Sheriff 'stache that identifies him as an imposing figure of authority a mile away. Given how he went from enforcing law in a dusty town to depopulating the prehistoric age he certainly lives up to his 'stache's reputation.
• Mission Control: After meeting Thunderstick and purchasing weapons for the first time, Thunderstick serves as Sam's intel with a communicator bracelet, offering him feedback and the occasional banter in cutscenes and gameplay.
• Never Bareheaded: No cowboy could be seen without a Stetson, right? Sam can be mauled, bitten, shot at, trampled, or forced into high-speed chases, his hat remains on in every cutscene.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: Deinosuchuses are a recurring threat in swamp and marsh-based levels, resembling larger versions of modern-day crocodiles who relentlessly tries chomping on Sam.
• No Range Like Point-Blank Range: Sam's standard execution towards the dinosaur-humanoid mooks; bringing them to their knees, shoving his revolver to their foreheads, and pulling the trigger.
• Off with His Head!: Another recurring death animation the game allows, if Sam uses large-bore weapons (rifles, shotguns, etc) to finish off larger enemies by aiming for the head or neck their entire noggin will be blown away. Some dinosaurs can even move a little sans head before collapsing! Decapitations can also be performed on the dino-humanoids via katana.
• One-Winged Angel: Tusk, achieving his Ultimate Life Form status as an abomination called The Collector by injecting almost all the stolen dinosaur DNA into himself, becoming a towering human-reptile-mechanical monstrosity that towers over Sam. He's the Final Boss at the end of the game, of course.
• Ribcage Ridge: After the opening cutscene that ends with everyone teleported to millions of years ago, Sam wakes up... underneath the massive ribcage of some dinosaur, causing him to realize he's been displaced somewhere else. Throughout the game dinosaur ribcages of various sizes can be seen adorning various stages.
• Rock Monster: Taking a break from facing dinosaurs, giant insects, dino-men and the like, the temple and caverns near the end has rock giants as enemies. Who collapses into bloodless chunks when killed.
• Savage Spinosaurs: Hostile Spinos are a recurring enemy, firstly appearing as the second boss Elosaurus Genitrix before returning degraded into a Giant Mook. They're roughly as tough as T-Rexes from the earlier stages, and slightly faster and more cunning.
• Scary Stinging Swarm: While exploring the wilderness Sam can come across beehives, and he's given an option to rip those apart for the honey. He'll be instantly swarmed by prehistoric bees and can only flee (taking some hard-to-avoid damage most of the time), though he can use the obtained honey to regain health once he reaches a camp site.
• The Sheriff: This was Sam Judge's supposed profession, being an enforcer meant to uphold justice in the Wild West. But then a time-warp drags him to prehistoric times and all goes to hell.
• Sniper Rifle: Two of these shows up, both of the modern-day variety that turns the screen into a single scope when aiming. Sam obtains a standard-issue rifle early on and can purchase a Barrett M82CQ that fires anti-tank shells later.
• Temper-Ceratops: Triceratops are among the many appearing dinosaurs and they're hostile by default, trying to gore Sam on sight.
• Terrifying Tyrannosaur: Well no doy, Tyrannosaurs are a recurring enemy that antagonizes Sam. They can take far more hits than Raptors, Gorgosaurs or Carnosaurs.
• Terror-dactyl: Ornithocheirus are the sole avian dinosaur encountered, and they repeatedly attempt chewing up Sam while swooping all over the place.
• Toxic Dinosaur: The game's dilophosauruses enemies follow the Jurassic Park mold - skinny raptor-like creatures with frills that opens up and the ability to eject poisonous spit from a distance. Getting Sam hit by their bile results in a short Interface Screw where the screen is coated with dilophosaur loogie for several seconds.
• Tough Armored Dinosaur: The ankylosaur and stegosaur enemies are far more durable than other mooks, and only vulnerable if shot in the heads.
• Trapped in the Past: The very premise - Sam, Violet and Tusk are snatched from the Wild West into the era of dinosaurs, Sam needs to find Violet and a way back. And it turns out Tusk isn't a victim but willingly allow himself to be taken into the past as part of his plans to become the Ultimate Life Form.