Editorials
[You Should Play This] Travel the ‘Death Road to Canada’
“You Should Play This” focuses on modern horror games worth your time and attention.
The zombie apocalypse is overdone in much the same way saying that the zombie apocalypse is overdone is. It takes something truly novel to escape from the rancid horde of me too half-hearted undead fodder.
In the realm of video games, this is as true as anywhere else. The use of zombies and the aforementioned zombie apocalypse are rarely done well. The indie scene has plenty of the fodder, but it also houses most of the good takes as well.
Take Death Road to Canada. A beautiful hybrid of text-based adventure and roguelike dungeon crawler with a deliriously silly sense of humor, this procedurally-generated indie gem both embraces and pokes fun at the zombie genre with plenty of knowing nods to other media and the tropes they often employ.
The title is somewhat explanatory. You must guide survivors of a zombie apocalypse in the US on a road trip to the supposed safe haven that is Canada. Simple enough on the surface, but there’s plenty to be worried about on the journey there.
Your party of up to four survivors must scrape together fuel for the car they’re using for the road trip. Then there’s the small matter of weapons, ammo, food, and medical supplies as well. You can acquire these whenever the game offers up a location to raid. Then your intrepid little posse must smack, batter, and generally destroy the shambling undead as you search gas stations, hotels, sewers and more to get some goodies.
During these 2D top-down action-oriented segments, you wield whatever you can find. That can be anything from shopping carts to pistols to lump hammers and all sorts in between. They can break, of course, meaning you have to time your shots (one hit might knock a zombie down, but not end it outright) and try to keep ahead of the hordes rather than take the fight to them every time (especially as you’ll knacker your poor survivors out).
It helps that the undead are the slow and shuffling type. You plan right and you can avoid large swathes of them on your way to gathering supplies. Yet in true old-fashioned zombie tradition, it’s very easy to let a group of them surround you, and that is almost always going to end badly for you.
Lucky for you that as long as one of your party is alive, you’re still in the game. With the procedural nature of what Death Road to Canada throws at you, however, a rather relatively inane moment can see it all fall apart in morbidly amusing fashion. Then it’s time to have another crack, with new survivors, slightly different places, and more oddball moments.
The oddball moments mostly come during the text-based side of Death Road to Canada. As the group travel on the road, they’ll have conversations and be faced with choice-based scenarios. The outcome of these vary depending on a) what the character’s traits are, and b) if they’re human or otherwise. Yes, your party can consist of more than just human survivors. There are dogs and cats (who can drive, because why not?) and even a very grumpy gnome to be found on the way to the Great White North. The replay value in Death Road to Canada is found in these ever-changing mixes of apocalyptic cliches and off the wall oddities.
You may only get a small amount of time in the company of certain characters, and you may not make it to Canada (it’s not as easy as it sounds), but it’s easy to get attached sometime, and maybe have a brief regret when Hank the gentle giant who can punch a broken car into a working state is swallowed by the horde in the dank depths of a dilapidated cannery.
Death Road to Canada takes the grey grimness of the post-apocalypse and splatters it with goofy 16-bit-styled charm. It trades a darker, nastier side for its comedy edge, but it remembers what surviving a zombie apocalypse is supposed to be about, traveling to a faraway place with a surly gnome, a belligerent canine companion, and an anime-obsessed, katana-wielding young lady. All in the hope of a better life.
Death Road to Canada is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One.
Comics
‘Spider-Noir’ Comic Changes Explained: How the TV Series Reinvents Marvel’s Darkest Spider-Man
A little while back, I wrote an article chronicling the Hellraiser franchise’s affinity for Film Noir and touched on how that genre has, historically, always been connected to horror.
This connection can be observed in everything from the cannibalistic serial killers of Frank Miller’s Sin City to the disturbing criminal plots fueling neo-noir thrillers like Stuart Gordon’s underrated King of the Ants. That’s why it came as no surprise when I finally sat down to watch all eight episodes of Prime Video’s recently released Spider-Noir series and was confronted with plenty of classic horror tropes.
What did come as a surprise, however, was how showrunners Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot approached these horror elements when compared to the 2009 comic book that the show is based on. From the heavily altered rogue’s gallery to an equally terrifying yet completely different origin story for Nicolas Cage’s take on the webslinger, there are plenty of changes here that I feel might be of interest to genre fans.
With that in mind, I’d like to invite readers to take a closer look at all the adjustments that Spider-Noir made to the story in order to bring this incarnation of Spider-Man to life in all of its monochromatic glory (unless you watched the True-Hue color version of the show, in which case you’ll be treated to a surprisingly comic-booky palette that you don’t usually see on television).
The Dark Origins of Marvel’s Spider-Man Noir
Our first order of business should be to examine the origins of the Noir comics themselves. Originally published as part of the Marvel Noir alternate universe that reimagined several characters as hard-boiled crime-fighters, Spider-Man Noir became the most successful book in the entire run. This highly politicized story about Peter Parker coming to terms with the capitalist evils of the Great Depression seemed to have struck a nerve with audiences looking for a darker take on the wall-crawler, which is likely why we’d soon see several sequel stories as well as a video game adaptation of the character in 2010’s underrated Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions.
Of course, it wasn’t just Spider-Man’s darker disposition that made this version of the character a hit, as 1930s New York City was depicted as being much more hostile than what we generally see in the standard Marvel Universe. From Peter’s powers coming from an Eldritch Spider God that spawns man-eating arachnids to Vulture being an ex-Freak-Show Gimp with a taste for human flesh, you can definitely understand why this Web-Head isn’t pulling his punches.
Unfortunately, this alternate universe was a little too popular for its own good, with each subsequent sequel/adaptation further diluting the political anger and classic horror influences that fueled the original comic-book run in order to appeal to a wider audience. Spider-Man Noir was nearly unrecognizable once we got to the Spider-Verse crossover that turned the character into a household name, though this would at least lead to an interesting adaptation in 2018.
The Classic Horror Influences Hidden Throughout Spider-Noir
Jack Huston as Sandman in ‘Spider-Noir’
When Phil Lord and Chris Miller finally translated Spider-Man Noir to the big screen, with Nicolas Cage bringing the character to life in an unexpected case of pitch-perfect casting, he was still mostly relegated to comic relief as his nazi-punching antics and over-the-top edginess were played for laughs. However, while this version of the character had little to do with the comics that spawned him, Spider-Noir’s newfound popularity eventually resulted in the announcement of a darker live-action spin-off – a spin-off that I was cautiously optimistic about.
While the showrunners ultimately decided to go in a completely different direction than the 2009 comic, the new team of writers appeared to understand Noir as a genre in ways that even the folks at Marvel Noir couldn’t quite grasp. That’s likely why 2026’s Spider-Noir boasts plenty of horror elements, just not in ways we’ve seen them before.
The series is obviously borrowing tropes and aesthetics from period-accurate monster movies, with Universal’s 1930s output being a particularly big influence. From the re-imagining of Sandman and Tombstone as tragic figures to The Spider even being operated on by a mad scientist with hilariously antiquated techniques, this bizarre collection of super-powered freaks could have easily shown up in a classic creature feature.
The scares aren’t all retro, however, as the showrunners also injected plenty of body-horror into the mix during their attempt at unifying the origin stories for all these larger-than-life characters. Hell, the Spider himself is now revealed to have gained his powers after being bitten by a half-mutated Man-Spider during World War I, and the aforementioned mad scientist keeps a disturbing collection of failed experiments in her basement, proving that not all of her patients were lucky enough to simply gain superpowers after being experimented on.
Nicolas Cage Reinvents Spider-Man Noir for Television
Ben Reilly/Spiderman (Nicolas Cage) in SPIDER-NOIR
Photo: Aaron Epstein/Prime
© Amazon Content Services LLC
I also really appreciate how Cage insists on depicting Ben Reilly as an arachnid trapped inside of a human body, with his uncanny physical performance and classic Hollywood impressions keeping your eyes glued to the screen while also providing some of the show’s funniest moments.
I still think it’s a shame that the character is no longer politically motivated, and I miss the detail about Uncle Ben having been cannibalized by Vulture after his social activism ruffled too many feathers, but at least this time our protagonist actually feels like someone who could have been written by Raymond Chandler if he were a fan of Superheroes.
In fact, the writers nailed the snappy back-and-forth that Noir authors like Dashiel Hammett used to refer to as the “riposte”, and it’s fun to see supervillains being depicted as horrific movie monsters instead of specialized henchmen – with The Spider feeling like just as much of a Freak Show attraction as the rest of them. Purists might be put off by the lack of reverence for the source material, but I think that’s a small price to pay when even the show’s most clichéd moments intentionally harken back to the golden age of Hollywood.
That’s why I’d argue that Amazon’s Spider-Noir isn’t really an adaptation, but rather an equally valid take on the same premise that inspired Marvel back in 2009. And in a world filled with recycled storylines that only serve to advertise future releases, I’d rather have two completely different visions of the same character than a straight-up retelling of the same handful of ideas.
At the end of the day, there’s enough space inside this comic fan’s heart for both man-eating Vultures and a Cronenberg-inspired Man-Spider. And if you’re also a fan of nostalgic creature features with comic book flair, I’d highly recommend this street-level superhero story with a spooky twist.
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