I like zombies. Not zombies themselves (I don’t know any of them personally and I don’t expect they’d like my quiche), but pretty much any kind of zombie media. Put your zombies in a volcano and I will apparently be there. So, when I was told that zombies were mixing with This War of Mine and a Boogie Nights (but evil) aesthetic, I knew I had to check out Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days.
The good news is that it’s very, very good, especially as far as Steam Early Access zombie games go. This is a slick, mean 2.5D side-scrolling stealth action game with light base-building and survival mechanics that feels familiar yet nicely fresh. Set during an outbreak in Walton City in 1980, Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days represents a brave stylistic departure for a series that you probably first downloaded on your iPhone 5.
Choosing from one of several currently available survivor duos, you spawn in a rickety safehouse and learn the ropes. It’s not just “food = good, zombies = bad” — there’s actually a lot going on here.
Each survivor has their own health, hunger, energy, and morale to take care of, with some survivors even having personality traits that can affect their various statuses over time. There’s one guy who wants to walk into the ocean when he’s slightly hungry (he’s just like me!). Let anything deplete too much and your survivor will perform less well, pick up negative modifiers, or, you know, die. My first ever duo was actually a couple, Tracy and Wayne. When Wayne died after I sprinted off a rooftop, Tracy pretended to be alright for a minute, got a slight morale boost, but then she just left the safehouse in the middle of the night, never to be seen again.
Cool, if a bit annoying. More vegetable soup for Joe, I guess.
I had to go out with Wayne as food was running low and I also needed to look for specific items to progress the story path I’d chosen in order to try and escape Walton City. This is where Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is at its strongest. Skulking through fire stations, schools, building sites and many more locales while contending with the undead is almost always tense, as things can fall apart quickly. Individual zombies aren’t too hard to deal with, especially with the stealth insta-kills. But if you make too much noise, you’ll unleash all the previously oblivious zombies in the foreground and background of the 2.5D plane. Our Darkest Days is a melee-centric game, so you’ll only ever be able to deal with a couple of zombies at most — time to make a mad dash for the exit with whichever crumbs you managed to loot.
With scavenged resources, you’ll build up your safehouse over time with workstations to allow you to produce food yourself, as well as fix and make weapons. But, as zombies are slowly pounding away at your barricades, you inevitably have to move on to find another safehouse. This is both a clever and slightly annoying mechanic. It doesn’t let you get too comfortable or complacent, but it does also mean that you never get too attached to anywhere. At the end of my playthrough, I think I must’ve had about six different safehouses, yet I couldn’t tell you a single defining trait of any of them. A bit more customisation — a poster here, an action figure there — would go a long way towards making your safehouse feel like, well, a house. It’d also make it even more devastating to have to move.
There is one other thing in particular about Our Darkest Days that I think could potentially put it over the edge into all-timer zombie game category. My main bugbear is just how rigid it currently is, especially if you want to start over. Locations remain the same throughout runs, as do survivors and stories. There’s nothing wrong with linearity whatsoever, but it’s just a bit dull here to have to go through the plodding early loop of “go here > stealth around > pick up 4 water bottles > find this survivor > scavenge this > build that” every time you want to experience a new story path or have a complete survivor wipeout.
It’s especially painful because the “endings” are as simple as a piece of art with a few sentences of text. They would just generally be very disappointing anyway without the mundanity of the early parts; I’m certain they’ll be fleshing those out before 1.0, though.
I’d personally love a more roguelite focused side mode of some kind to accompany the main attraction, where you can pick a character with randomised traits, and then go and find randomised survivors in randomised spots. Make no mistake, the storylines PikPok have crafted are pretty interesting and the player choice is great with branching paths, but I’d like just a bit more randomness to keep things fresh.
Don’t let my wish fulfillment ramble put you off Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days, though. What’s here is really, really great. It’s supremely tense, with a melancholic mood that contrasts with the sun-scorched skies quite interestingly. It also looks fantastic, boasting some quite excellent shadows and character art. There is some jank in the animations, yet nothing that ever took me out of it. The developer also seems to be rolling out pretty frequent updates, and you can tell a lot of love has been poured into the game so far. If you’re looking for a zombie game to dip in and out of on your Steam Deck, Our Darkest Days is worth keeping an eye on.
It’s also never not fun to watch zombies plummet off of rooftops. Idiots.
A Steam key was provided by PR for the purposes of this preview.
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