Game: Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days
Developer: PikPok (New Zealand & Colombia)
Publisher: PikPok
Genre: Side-Scrolling Shelter Survival
1.0 Release: March 2027
Current Status: Early Access
Setting: 1980s Texas
Platforms: Steam · Epic · PS5 · Xbox · Switch 2 · GeForce NOW
🧟 Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days leaves Early Access in March 2027, launching its 1.0 release simultaneously across Steam, the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and GeForce NOW.
🎮 You Don’t Have to Wait — It’s Playable Now
March 2027 is a long way off, but this is a 1.0 announcement, not a reveal. Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is already in Early Access and has been growing through player feedback and continuous updates — expanded survival systems, refined gameplay, and new content.
If the premise appeals, you can be playing tonight and arrive at 1.0 having already lived through several failed shelters.
Survival here isn’t only about avoiding the infected. It’s about maintaining hope, trust, and the will to keep going.
Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is a side-scrolling shelter survival game set in an unforgiving 1980s Texas. You scavenge dwindling resources, build and manage shelters, and guide a fragile group of survivors through a city that is actively trying to kill them — while making the sort of moral decisions that don’t have a clean answer.
Developer and publisher PikPok have now confirmed the game will reach its full 1.0 release in March 2027, alongside a new gameplay trailer showing off expanded systems and the choices waiting at launch.
The Zombies Aren’t the Hard Part
💔 Hope and Trust as Survival Resources
PikPok are explicit about it: survival depends not only on avoiding the infected, but on maintaining hope, trust, and the will to find a way out of the city.
That framing is what separates this from most zombie survival games. The infected are the obstacle; the actual system you’re managing is a group of frightened people whose willingness to keep going is finite and can be spent.
It’s also why the moral decisions matter mechanically rather than narratively. In a game where trust is a resource, a choice that keeps everyone alive but breaks the group’s faith in you isn’t obviously the right one — and that’s a considerably more interesting problem than deciding where to point a shotgun.
The 1980s Texas setting does useful work too. No phones, no internet, no way to find out whether anywhere else is any better. It strips out every modern convenience that would otherwise resolve the situation, and it gives the whole thing a specific texture rather than the generic ruined-city look the genre defaults to.
The Loop
🔦 Scavenge
Venture out for dwindling resources, knowing the city has already been picked over and what’s left is guarded by something.
🏠 Build the Shelter
Construct and manage a base that has to keep a group of people alive, fed and willing to stay.
⚖️ Decide
Impossible moral choices where every option carries consequences for the people relying on you.
🚪 Escape
The goal isn’t to last forever — it’s to find a way out of the city with the survivors you’ve managed to keep.
Six Platforms, All at Once
🌐 An Unusually Wide Simultaneous Launch
1.0 arrives on Steam, the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and GeForce NOW — all in March 2027.
GeForce NOW at launch is the one worth noting. Cloud support usually arrives later, if at all, and including it day one means the game is effectively playable on anything with a screen — which suits a management-heavy survival sim you’ll want to dip into rather than dedicate a rig to.
The passion and feedback from our Early Access community has helped shape and drive Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days into an experience even better than what we originally envisioned.
— Mario Wynands, CEO, PikPok
🧟 Zombies
🏠 Base Building
📉 Survival Management
↔️ Side-Scrolling
⚖️ Choices Matter
🎯 Single-Player
Who’s Making It
🎮 PikPok
A 200-person developer and publisher spread across New Zealand and Colombia, working across PC, console and mobile. Their catalogue includes the Into the Dead series, the Rival Stars franchise, the BAFTA-nominated Super Monsters Ate My Condo, and Shatter and Shatter Remastered Deluxe.
The Into the Dead lineage is worth a moment. The series made its name on tense, stripped-back running games — sprint forward, don’t stop, don’t look back. Turning that into a systems-heavy shelter management sim about keeping a group’s morale intact is a considerable pivot, and a more ambitious one than franchise extensions usually attempt.
Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days reaches 1.0 in March 2027. It’s available in Early Access now.
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