A Gritty Apocalypse Worth Surviving
Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days isn’t your typical zombie game. Forget the over-the-top gunplay and headshot counters. This is survival at its rawest—grim, emotional, and punishing. Developed by PikPok and now in Early Access on Steam, Our Darkest Days trades action hero fantasy for desperate realism. It’s not about how many zombies you kill. It’s about who you’re willing to lose to keep going.
Set in 1980s Texas, this side-scrolling survival sim blends base-building, stealth-focused scavenging, and character-driven management. The result? A game that feels somewhere between This War of Mine, Project Zomboid, and a slow-burn horror film—complete with VHS vibes and tough moral decisions.
The Setup: Survival by Any Means
The game begins with you choosing two survivors—ordinary folks, each with quirks, skills, and baggage. One might be able to carry more, another might consume less food, but none are fighters. They’re just people trying to make it one more day.
From there, you set up camp in a temporary shelter. You cook, craft, and assign tasks by day. By night, you brave the streets of a dying city—gutted motels, gas stations, firehouses—trying to find the supplies you need to last another day. It’s side-scrolling, real-time survival with a heavy emphasis on stealth and planning.
Gameplay Breakdown: Systems That Feed the Stress
🏠 Shelter Management
This is where Our Darkest Days stands out. Survivor needs are constant and interwoven—hunger, fatigue, stress, and morale all have consequences. Assigning who cooks, who crafts, who rests, and who scavenges becomes a tense balancing act. Permadeath looms over every bad decision.
- Crafting: Barricades, food, tools, even moonshine for morale.
- Stress & Trauma: Lose a survivor, and others may break. Keep pushing tired or starving characters, and they won’t last long.
- Progression: Unlock cooking stations, dismantling benches, med bays—all of which carry over when you move to a new base.
🧟 Scavenging Missions
Every run into the city is a mini-horror story. You sneak through environments, using bottles and noise cues to distract zombies, scrounging for resources while watching your stamina and inventory.
- Stealth Over Combat: Fighting zombies is a last resort. The melee system is clunky, unreliable, and brutal.
- Level Design: Each area includes hidden paths, locked doors, vertical spaces, and shortcuts. You can revisit old spots for more loot or to scout future safehouses.
- Permadeath: Make one bad call—like turning a corner too loud—and your survivor might not come back.
What It Gets Right
🎨 Atmosphere and Setting
The 1980s Texas backdrop feels lived-in and haunting. The art style mixes 2.5D design with cinematic lighting, and the VHS-style overlays evoke vintage horror. The world is quiet, sun-bleached, and oppressive—like The Last of Us without the budget, but all the grit.
🧠 Survivor Systems
Every survivor matters. Some have relationships (like couples or friends), and their deaths affect group morale. Others have traits—like alcoholism or claustrophobia—that impact shelter life or scavenging performance. It adds weight to your choices and encourages emotional investment.
🎮 Gameplay Loop
- Morning: Assign tasks.
- Day: Rest, craft, cook, repair.
- Night: Send someone out to scavenge.
- Repeat—and pray they make it back.
This loop is simple but tense. Every choice has weight, every scavenging trip could be the last, and resources never feel like enough.
🔁 Replayability
With randomized loot, various survivor combos, new shelters, and a progression system tied to unlocks, the game encourages replaying—and every run feels different. Sometimes you thrive. Sometimes you just survive.
What Still Needs Work
🗡️ Combat & Stealth
- Combat: Melee is floaty and vague, with weak feedback and poor hit detection. It’s meant to be risky—but currently, it’s just frustrating.
- Stealth: Enemy behavior is inconsistent. Hiding in bushes sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. There are moments where you feel clever—and others where it feels broken.
💻 Technical Issues
- Performance: Even on strong PCs, the game suffers from stuttering, frame drops, and screen tearing. For a side-scroller, that’s rough.
- Bugs: Zombies stuck in walls, repeated falling deaths, AI breaking animations mid-swing. It’s not constant, but when it hits, it stings—especially with no manual save.
🧳 Inventory and UI
- No Mid-Mission Use of Items: You can’t use health items unless they’re equipped as weapons. Strange design choice that often leads to preventable deaths.
- Cluttered Management: The shelter UI, inventory system, and survivor assignment menus are functional but lack the polish needed for deep micromanagement.
📝 Narrative & Objectives
There’s a light framework of goals—reach a new safehouse, unlock a map sector—but no strong storyline yet. Survivors have personality, but there’s little overarching narrative to tie it all together. Hopefully, this evolves during Early Access.
The Emotional Weight of Survival
What Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days does best isn’t the scavenging or the crafting. It’s the way it makes you care. Losing a character hits hard—not just because of their stats, but because of what they meant to the group.
One moment, you’re managing your base, stretching your last can of beans. The next, you’re watching a survivor break down in grief because their partner didn’t come back from a scavenge run. It’s not melodramatic—it’s quietly devastating.
The Cost of Early Access
At $25, Our Darkest Days is fairly priced for what it offers. There’s a solid 6–10 hours of content now, with more promised. PikPok is transparent about the roadmap and is taking feedback seriously. Updates have already added new weapons, better AI responsiveness, and new crafting options.
But this is still Early Access. Performance is spotty. Bugs are present. And certain systems—stealth, combat, inventory—need major refinement. If you’re patient and love being part of a game’s evolution, now’s a good time to jump in. If not, wishlist it and check back after a few big patches.
🌟 What Hits Hard
✅ Unique 1980s setting with grim, emotional tone
✅ Tense, thoughtful shelter and survivor management
✅ High-stakes scavenging with real consequences
✅ Excellent use of atmosphere and visual storytelling
✅ Deep replayability with evolving survivor dynamics
⚠️ What Needs Fixing
❌ Clunky melee and unreliable stealth
❌ No manual saves—brutal when bugs strike
❌ Performance issues even on good hardware
❌ Weapon durability and combat balance need tuning
❌ Minimal narrative direction for now
Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days: Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is a gritty, promising survival sim that nails tone and tension—but still needs polish and balance to reach its full potential. It’s not for everyone. But for fans of This War of Mine or Project Zomboid who want an emotional, side-scrolling survival experience with real stakes, it’s worth watching—and maybe even playing now. – Obsidian