It’s not that Zombie Survival is a particularly underserved genre — checking Steam will net you twenty games with ‘zombie’ and ‘survival’ both appearing in the title, with the category of the same name offering options in the hundreds. So, Into the Dead has some competition for the title of ‘most impressive zombie survival game ever’. I would argue, though, that it doesn’t have a lot of competition for that title.
Contrary to most entries in the genre, Into the Dead isn’t a sandbox exploration game with a focus on base building. No, the developers have a much more focused goal in mind.
Set in the mid-sized Texas town of Walton in the year 1980, Into the Dead takes place a few weeks after a zombie outbreak turned the city into a slaughterhouse. Some people fled before the government closed the town off to keep the zombies from spreading, and now the few surviving souls have to find a way to escape the city.
Equal parts base management and scavenging action, Into the Dead starts players off by allowing the player to choose which pair of characters to use from a handful of options. Every character has a positive and negative characteristic that affect how they play, so a character might have a bonus to repairing their hideout’s defenses but also is a vegetarian who takes a major morale hit if they’re forced to eat meat in order to survive.
Characters have three main stats — hunger, tiredness, and morale — and if any of them get too low they’ll acquire negative traits that affect their ability to both scavenge and work around the base. Successfully surviving the zombie outbreak means constantly finding new sources of food and water, along with the construction parts they’ll need to build weapons and improve the base so that the survivors can keep their conditions high. It’s important to recruit as many survivors as can be found out in the city, but every one means another mouth to feed, and the town has already been pretty much picked clean in the weeks since the outbreak started. Scavenging the most dangerous areas of the city is where the game starts, and the threat only builds from there.
Into the Dead’s greatest strength is how compelling these scavenging sequences are. Each day has a day phase and a night phase, during which survivors can be assigned to maintenance tasks around the base or head out to scavenge locations. This scavenging takes place from a side-view perspective, with the player creeping through crumbling buildings, trying to avoid making any noise that might alert the hordes of zombies that fill almost every location.
Zombies are unusually threatening in Into the Dead, not because they have any special abilities, but because the survivors are realistically frail. Any given room will likely have at least one zombie in it, but so long as the survivor is quiet, they’ll stay idle. Run, jump, or use a loud weapon to stealth kill a zombie, and the player can suddenly discover that what they thought were a pile of corpses is actually a bunch of very hungry zombies ready to pounce. It’s not too difficult to take out a single foe, but once a second and third undead enter the fray, the player has to decide whether to flee or risk the permadeath of one of their characters. No matter how placid a location may seem, any situation can turn deadly in seconds, making every scavenging excursion and exercise in masterfully sustained tension.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how incredible the game looks. I was impressed not just with the overall graphical fidelity (which is stunning) but by how effectively the developers have used the look of their locations to tell the story of the zombie outbreak. Each new building features the aftermath of desperate attempts to survive the inevitable. Pools of blood, smashed furniture, blocked stairwells, all of it lets the player see just how fast everything went wrong, and how hard people fought before being added to the hordes of the dead. Also impressive is the use of background elements — while the gameplay is strictly occurring on a 2D plane, every location stretches back into the distance, giving the player a great overview of the environment, letting them see that no part of the city was spared.
While far from finished, Into the Dead is already a complete experience. There are currently two ways to beat the game and escape the city, and I’ve managed to finish one of them. More escape plans and locations to search are promised, as are additional game modes, although exactly what those will entail isn’t exactly clear just yet.
Even in its current early state, Into the Dead‘s gameplay is so well-designed that I can wholeheartedly recommend it, but I am interested to see what complications and rewards are added as they build out towards the full release. The only thing missing right now is a character element — each pair of survivors comes with a backstory, but no one has any meaningful dialogue and there are no story elements beyond the need to find a way out of the town, so enhancing that aspect would be quite welcome. However, Even with threadbare story elements, this is still a masterpiece of zombie survival gaming, and hopefully it will only get better from here.
Buy Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days, EARLY ACCESS – PC
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