Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is a shelter survival game that tasks you with guiding a small group of survivors out of a zombie-infested city. The best comparison I can make is to the game 60 Seconds!, which challenges players to assign members of a group specific actions to complete each day against a ticking clock.
Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days plays very similarly. The game revolves around your shelter, its barricade, and your survivors, each of whom can complete one task during each of a day’s two phases: day and night. Your barricade is attacked at the end of each phase. Tasks can range from crafting weapons or cooking food to exploring the outside world. Each task requires resources—either physical materials like wood or duct tape or survival elements such as a character’s hunger or morale. The goal is to manage these resources to keep your shelter functioning as long as possible, until you can eventually escape the city through the game’s narrative paths, which you uncover while physically exploring on scavenging runs.
Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is a pretty cool idea for a game, but since it is still in Early Access, it’s no surprise that the game has areas that could use improvement.
Visually, I think the game knocks it out of the park. The unique 1980s setting is portrayed wonderfully through the graphics, and the distinct character designs give a lot of personality to each of the starting pairs—further enhanced by the fact that each character has unique strengths and weaknesses.
One area the game currently lacks is meaningful base building. Your resources, when not spent on eating, healing, or making weapons, go toward barricade upgrades or new crafting tables. While these are essential, they don’t feel particularly rewarding to work toward. This isn’t helped by the fact that there’s no physical defense of your shelter—characters simply take damage each phase when the barricade breaks. Some physical base building focused on defending against enemy attacks could help make scavenging efforts feel more rewarding.
Scavenging, while done manually by the player in a cool twist on the genre, is limited by the fact that each map remains the same in every playthrough. While loot is randomized, important points of interest and the layout of each area stay consistent in new games. This includes interactive elements of the Escape Plans, which means you can speedrun the game if you know where everything is. Once you loot a place, it stays looted, which is cool, but it also completely removes the need to backtrack—a design choice I have mixed feelings about.
Combat in Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days feels a little strange and is definitely one area I’d like to see improved before launch. It’s clearly designed to feel risky and deadly if done incorrectly. Taking hits from zombies is devastating, and attacking with weaker weapons can be slow—assuming your weapon doesn’t break and leave you fighting with your fists. The game wants to emphasize stealth and stealth kills over brawling, which fits the realistic survival approach it’s aiming for.
However, there are a few problems here and there that can make combat feel frustrating when it’s necessary. Basic melee combat seems to rely on an animation chain and hit-stagger system, with most weapons using a three-hit combo. Strangely, your first two attacks always stagger the enemy, but zombies often interrupt the third hit with their own attack. During this time, zombies are invulnerable and always land a hit, making the third attack feel functionally useless. I think I managed to land it once, during a zombie’s attack animation, only because I had enough time and space. The game has a dodge system, but zombies often attack too quickly or from too far for it to be effective. Players can also take damage while locked into execution or finisher animations, which makes them feel useless when more than one zombie is nearby.
Stealth isn’t a perfect solution either, as stealth kills drain your weapon’s durability and often trigger aggro from nearby zombies. While it’s always better to use stealth, it’s frustrating when your weapon breaks during a stealth kill or more zombies are drawn in immediately after. Some players might find these features realistic, but they don’t feel great in practice.
Regardless, I’d like to see zombie animations and hit frames adjusted so combos feel rewarding and executions don’t punish you with unavoidable damage. While difficult combat is core to the game’s identity, I think it could be a little less punishing, especially with multiple zombies involved.
Overall, I think Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is a really cool concept. The unique presentation and shelter-based gameplay offer a type of zombie game we don’t have right now—something like a more digestible version of Project Zomboid. However, the Early Access launch isn’t without flaws, many of which are already addressed in the Early Access roadmap. We’ll have to wait and see what the game becomes at full release.
Pros:
- Great artwork and setting
- Unique survival gameplay we don’t have a lot of in the Zombie genre
Cons:
- Slightly underwhelming exploration
- Not-so-rewarding base expansion
- Combat needs serious tweaking before launch
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