Whether the sun is set high above, scorching the land beneath, or finally dipping below the horizon, casting cool eerie shadows along the ground, this desolate world you’ll be dropping into will always asks you to fight for survival. Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is an upcoming zombie survival game tossing you into Texas, another part of the world that was quickly succumbed by mindless zombies. Each corner you turn lays new obstacles you’ll need to overcome to live another day.
This upcoming game comes from the talented folks over at PikPok, and we recently had the chance to chat with the team. Thanks to Art Manager Duncan Withers and Senior Narrative Designer Mike Boyes, we learned more about what we can expect from Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days.
Gameranx: How would you describe Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days?
Duncan Withers, Art Manager: Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is an atmospheric side-scrolling survival game. It blends elements of action, stealth, management and strategy games to try and create something wholly unique. The team’s goal is to build a vehicle for players to live out their own survival fantasy, and to do so in a way that scares, shocks and thrills them.
Mike Boyes, Senior Narrative Designer: It’s a game about a group of vulnerable civilians trying to escape a doomed Texas city as it falls to the undead. You’re constantly on the move, shifting shelter from one abandoned place to another, scavenging for supplies and trying to avoid threats that pop up. There’s a lot of tough calls – I’ve accidentally killed enough innocent NPCs by now to realize that I should never be in charge during a crisis.
Gameranx: What were some of the narrative and gameplay inspirations behind Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days?
Duncan: The inspirations for Our Darkest Days are many and varied. The game was conceived as a way to take the established world and characters of our Into the Dead franchise and reimagine them as a third-person survival experience. Into the Dead games have always had high stakes and brutal consequences, so we knew we wanted to borrow the permadeath mechanic from roguelikes and make that central to our experience.
A large part of the visual and tonal inspiration came from horror movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s – not just zombie films, but slasher films, monster movies and the psychological horror of David Cronenberg and John Carpenter.
Gameranx: Was there a particular reason you opted to set this game in 1980s Texas?
Duncan: Our Darkest Days is the third game in our Into the Dead franchise, so those decisions were essentially made more than ten years ago. At the time, we were looking for a zombie experience that moved out of the large metropolitan areas that tended to dominate zombie fiction, and offer something different. We liked Texas for the variation in natural landscapes, and because it felt like a place with a defined identity. We felt there was a richness to the state that made it so easy to anchor our franchise to – allowing us to immerse our players in this world we are creating.
Mike: 1980 was a turbulent year: a vicious heatwave, a global oil crisis, hostages, hijackings, political upheaval, the waterbed fad… With all that instability, it’s a terrible time for an undead outbreak (though I can’t imagine there’s ever a good time for one).
Duncan: Right, and you see a lot of media celebrating the more gaudy aspects of mid-’80s culture, but very little in that period where the world is just starting to move on from the design and fashion choices of the 70s. So the art team was interested in exploring that era.
Gameranx: Can you elaborate on the scavenging mechanics? Would there be points of interest for players to choose from?
Duncan: Our scavenging gameplay is where players will spend most of their time, sending their vulnerable survivors out to dangerous locations in search of loot, other humans, new locations and information that might lead them out of the city. Players can choose to scavenge at any location on the map that is reachable from their current shelter – within a certain radius. Each location is unique, and the player is free to come and go as many times as they like, either during the day or at night. It’s up to the player to discover the best strategy for exploring the full extent of every stage and uncovering all of its secrets.
Mike: Scavenging is a risky endeavor so you gotta make it count.
Duncan: The player will have different objectives when they go out scavenging. Sometimes it may be purely resource gathering. If they are looking to move to a new shelter then a scavenging stage must be entirely cleared of zombies before they can move in. Other times, the player may be looking for a tall vantage point to unlock new stages. The player must decide the best strategy and loadout to achieve each objective.
Mike: The trick is to prioritize. You want to get in and out before you get wounded or the horror of the situation leaves lasting mental scars.
Duncan: Survival definitely depends on making intelligent choices about how to deal with the undead threat that is potentially lurking behind every door.
Gameranx: Does a survivor’s death during scavenging mean they are permanently lost?
Duncan: Yes! We wanted there to be real consequences to the player’s choices. So when a survivor dies on a run, they are gone for good.
Mike: That’s one of the challenges of trying to create horror in a video game. You need consequences for the threat to actually mean anything. We felt that having those stakes was important if the player was gonna actually feel threatened, as opposed to just being inconvenienced before they respawn.
Gameranx: Will players have the ability to recruit additional survivors to their group and would there be a limit as to how many you can have in their party?
Mike: You do meet other people when exploring the city and get the opportunity to bring them into your group.
Duncan: Players should think carefully before welcoming new survivors into their shelter, though, as while some aspects of a character will be visible to the player, others will remain a mystery until they are accepted.
Mike: And you have to consider how many survivors your shelter can realistically feed and house or there will be… issues.
Gameranx: We know zombies are the main threat but would there also be potential for other hostile factions to show up?
Duncan: Individual human enemies and more organised rival factions are both planned for eventual inclusion in the game. We believe they will offer players a different challenge to our zombie threat, and open up new and exciting gameplay opportunities. We’ll share more specific plans for these features in the future.
Gameranx: Could you give us an update as to the current stage of development?
Mike: We’ve been through the shiny ‘wouldn’t it be cool if X’ phase and then the terrifying ‘oh my God we actually have to build all this stuff’ phase and are now happily blazing ahead in the ‘this is actually coming together’ phase. Which is my favorite.
Gameranx: Do we know when players might get another look at Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days?
Duncan: We’re releasing our first public Steam demo in October this year.
Gameranx: We know this game is heading to PC but are there plans for consoles?
Duncan: We’re doing Steam first, with a plan for console release after that.
If this game looks interesting to you, then you won’t have to wait too long to get a chance to try it out. As the team mentioned, we should have a Steam demo in October of this year. Beyond that, we’ll have to wait and see when we will get our hands on the full game.
