Tried that dinosaur thing after a friend kept mentioning it and figured I might as well see what the pacing was actually like. Started small on the big map, mostly walking between patches of grass and checking thirst every few minutes while nothing much crossed my path.
At one point I found a half-eaten carcass near some rocks and managed to eat without getting spotted, but then it was back to slow movement across open ground. The whole stretch felt like it stretched out with long gaps between any real decisions.
The growth barely registers after twenty minutes and most encounters just mean turning around to avoid something bigger. In The Isle the waiting between those small actions starts to feel like the main activity.
https://dfaceme.com/game/the-isle