Preview: Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days - Strategic Zombie Survival that's Ideal for Steam Deck

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Ready for a zombie survival game crossed with This War of Mine? That's probably the closest comparison you can get to Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days. With a mix of action and strategy, it's your job to lead your survivors out of the city and escape the zombie hordes that surround them.

Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days - Gameplay Impressions

As mentioned previously, gameplay in Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days follows a similar vein to that of This War of Mine. You play from a side-on perspective, although the characters and world themselves are 3D, and the game is played in "phases".

At the start of each phase, you'll decide what each survivor will do, whether crafting, repairing barricades to protect yourself, scavenging for resources, or resting. If you do decide to go scavenging, that's where most of the gameplay is found.

Scavenging puts you on a fairly small and contained map, again viewed from the side. On these maps, your objective is to explore and find as many resources and materials as you can, while taking the least amount of damage from zombies around the map. You can use a variety of techniques at your disposal, such as sneaking, weapons, and dodging, to make it out alive.

At the end of each phase, your characters will take hits to various stats, depending on what happened during the previous phase, so the game becomes about balancing your party's hunger, fatigue, and health while making sure the shelter is secured, and if possible, progressing into newer shelters to eventually escape the city.

I found the game's combat to be a little on the tough side right now. The dodging mechanic seems pretty rough to use, and you'll almost inevitably take damage, which can lead to nasty status effects if you haven't got the right medication items on hand. Weapons are pretty essential, and hard to come by at the beginning of the game.

The game is still in Early Access, with plenty of updates due to come over the 12-18 months the game is planned to be worked on until the full release.

Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days - Steam Deck Performance Tested

The game does support 1280x800 and also has native controller support. But performance is a little on the disappointing side right now.

Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days isn't exactly the most detailed-looking game around, but it still is pretty harsh on the Steam Deck's GPU, meaning we have to run lower settings here. We can enable a couple of visual bonuses and still keep a locked 30 FPS, however.

I found that Global Illumination Quality was the main killer of performance here, so setting that to "Off" allows us to put other settings to their highest, like Volumetric Light Quality and Shadows, and still maintain 45 FPS quite well, which is what I recommend you do.

It is, of course, worth bearing in mind again that the game is still in Early Access, so I'm sure optimizations will come along down the line to improve performance.

Final Thoughts

Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days is a pretty brutal game as it stands. The combat feels a bit rough and unbalanced, making the difficulty curve spike after the first couple of scavenging missions. Even when equipped with a weapon, if you're facing 3 zombies at a time, which is common, it becomes very difficult to defend yourself, even worse, upon death, all other party members get a debuff, compounding the difficulty.

As for Steam Deck performance, it's pretty good. The game can hold 45 FPS with some nice lighting effects. I'm unsure why Global Illumination immediately kills performance as much as it does, but for now, the game looks decent, runs fairly smoothly, and controls well on the Steam Deck.

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