Our Darkest Days fuses Dead Island and This War of Mine for a novel twist on the zombie …

Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is here, early access warts and all. If the suitably evocative name wasn’t a loud enough tell, it’s yet another pulpy zombie game to add to the pile. You command a duo of plucky survivors tasked with not getting chomped by bitey bi-pedal flesh balls. There are walking (and shambling) stereotypes, dusty vestiges of civilization, and hackneyed genre tropes everywhere, but don’t despair. There’s a twist and one that might have just enough novelty to set it apart from the pack: 2.5D side-scrolling and a slant towards the individual survivor’s granular, intimate moment-to-moment business of staying alive. 

There’s no gunning down gargling hordes of the undead or traipsing across rangy open-worlds. This isn’t the bravado-filled power fantasy synonymous with the genre. You’re fragile, human, small. It’s stealth, strategy, a clever use of the environment, and even more careful management of scarce resources that will see you through to the next day. In that sense, it’s better compared to This War of Mine and State of Decay (with some of Dead Island‘s trashy aesthetic) than, say, Days Gone.

Fire up Our Darkest Days and you’re dropped into the fictional town of Walton circa 1980. It’s all sun-faded billboards, Texan twangs, chaps called Wayne, tarmac gargling in the oppressive heat, and angular corvettes with obnoxious hubcaps. It’s stylish stuff, elevated by a sharp UI and a clean, distinctive visual identity. Before diving in, you’ll pick from a cluster of survivor duos, each with their own fortes and cumbersome cons: a nimble, rebellious high schooler and her protective handyman father, a budding DJ and a bar owner, and so on. 

From there, you quickly learn that you live and you die by the strength of the barricades, ramshackle defenses that can only keep your temporary shelter safe from the undead for so long. To survive, you’ll assign your two survivors with tasks ranging from crafting tools, food, weapons, and medical supplies to sleeping and patching up the barricades to venturing out into Walton on scavenging runs. It plays out to the rhythm of a day and night cycle all with the ultimate aim of finding a new basecamp to migrate to.

During these sorties, you’ll encounter the feared undead in locales such as record stores, gas stations, and bungalows. But rather than running at you, they are often lurking behind doors and in dark rooms. A gung ho approach usually results in death, a permanence in Our Darkest Days, backed up by a grief system that sees your remaining survivor crumble under the mental toll of loss. Instead, patience and stealth are the name of the game. 

Creeping past the undead rather than engaging them in scrappy fights is often more judicious. Rusty scissors work as makeshift weapons to pull off stealth kills. You can peak through keyholes to survey rooms, but don’t linger too long or run the risk of being spotted. It’s all very tense with the threat of a mad scramble back to your shelter constantly in the back of your mind.

Success is much more about getting in, looting, and making a swift exit than axing your way through rotten flesh. Clearing out areas allows you to move in, setting up a better base of operations to then again venture out in search of more resources and new shelter. And then there’s the small task of keeping your people sane. All this death and despair weighs heavy on your survivors, triggering bouts of depression that, if left untreated, can make them nigh on useless, hampering your chances of survival.

In its current state, Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days needs, rather appositely, fleshing out. The lack of any meaningful narrative spine makes all that surviving a tad meaningless, especially given the disposable characters and the repetitiveness of the run-based format. What’s it all for? To what end? Once you’ve scrounged up enough supplies and moved shelters a few times to escape the crumbling barricades, Our Darkest Days starts to feel light and flimsy, not just on things to do but on twists and turns. 

Maybe that’s the point; longevity is a novelty in a zombie-infested world and developer PikPok is possibly striving to mimic that sense of futility. It’s still hard not to feel more than a bit cream-crackered by the loop after a while. But that’s what early access is for – to iron out the kinks, to elevate what works, and to fix what doesn’t. And as it goes, Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days has plenty that works and isn’t short on good ideas.

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