God knows there are plenty of zombie games of all kinds, but somehow they not only continue to fascinate us, but are clearly effective in providing a framework for good storytelling. In the world of games, they have proven countless times that they also create exciting game structure, and this is also true in Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days.
It’s worth noting that our impressions are based on an Early Access build, and as such we will return in the future to explore the full launch and any meaningful improvements.
Many of the aspects that make up Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days have been seen before, but remixed to such an extent that they form a rather effective zombie experience with no room for big surprises. But through effective gameplay, rather crisp graphics, and a focus on survival, Into the Dead gets the necessary depth that you initially think is missing.
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Into the Dead is a 2D side-scroller where you choose a few survivors to form the backbone of your own kind of colony, which gradually expands over time. Stuck in Walton, Texas, a fictional town that has been completely shut down after the zombie epidemic hit, it’s up to you to maintain your base, provide for your survivors’ basic needs while exploring specific objectives in Walton to gather resources, find weapons, and maintain a standard of living while looking for a way out.
To start with, as I said, you choose just two survivors, where in the base it makes sense to keep one at home, either to recuperate or to maintain barricades, for example, or do some kind of centralised upgrade. The other selects a target in Walton, from a constantly expanding map, to explore and loot resources. Into the Dead is a surprisingly detailed game graphically, and whether it’s the faint cone of light from your flashlight in the otherwise impenetrable darkness of an abandoned petrol station, or the dust hanging in the air when you notice a zombie moving on the floor above you, Into the Dead pulls out all the stops to create an immersive experience, and it works.
In the snapshot, there are familiar but effective gameplay models, too. There’s a simple stealth model that allows instant kills in certain situations, there’s a rudimentary but effective crafting model where you obviously have far too little inventory space to take everything you want to bring back with you, but which can all be used for meaningful upgrades to your base, and actual combat rarely involves more than timed blows with a club, a guitar, or whatever you find around. However, it is worth saying that the combat in particular has enough weight that it’s dangerous enough for your characters (who die permanently) to make it exciting every time.
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The problem is that while all these individual systems work, repetition sets in relatively quickly. The 2D perspective and base building is borrowed from This War of Mine, the concept of dire consequences for the individual survivor should a problem arise comes from State of Decay, and the whole zombie epidemic is such a familiar motif that there’s very little room for real surprises. Naturally, you expand your capabilities as more survivors arrive, and developer PikPok are to be commended for their relatively open but subtle way of gradually discovering ways to escape Walton. However, each time Hector rebuilds the barricades and you escape with enough duct tape, floorboards, and screws to survive another day, you realise that in the current version of Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days, there just isn’t much more.
It’s not that the game lacks features, but the way the loop is currently constructed, you are so exposed to the different aspects of this loop that it gets tiring quickly. Of course, when the core elements like the combat system, upgrade path, and even the survival mechanics seem pretty finely tuned at the time of writing, it’s easy to recommend Into the Dead to zombie enthusiasts. It’s well constructed, there’s no way around it, but perhaps it’s the lack of more direct storytelling that makes you feel like you’re groping in the dark and that repetition sets in faster as a result, and that takes away from what is otherwise quite enjoyable.
As it stands, Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is a fantastic foundation for PikPok to build on, and while the current loop became monotonous for me, especially without a narrative framework to refer to other than the stories I created myself, I respect it immensely.
