Previews
[Preview] Teach Your Son to Survive Before the Zombie Apocalypse Kills You in ‘Undying’
Undying was one of the hidden games of E3 2019, and I mean that in a quite literal sense. It was one of five titles on display at Giant Games’ booth, which was tucked into the northeastern corner of the South Hall of the Staples Center, surrounded by merchandise stands and low-budget hardware dealers.
Undying was barely mentioned in Giant’s pre-show press releases and its kiosk was well behind Giant’s desk, facing the wall, behind several other games like Pascal’s Wager that Giant clearly wanted to hype up. If E3 has difficulty settings, Undying cranked it up to impossible mode.
I am glad I managed to find it, by what amounts to sheer dumb luck, because Undying has an interesting, melancholy premise for a survival game. You play as Anling, a single mother who lives in an unspecified city (presumably American, given how easy it is to find firearms), who’s trying to keep her young son Cody safe in the early days of a full-scale zombie outbreak.
The big swerve is that Anling’s been bitten. In the playable demo on the E3 show floor, the meter that tracks the progress of her infection sits on top of the screen at all times, and is always ticking down. You can temporarily slow down the infection with medication, but you cannot cure it. Undying will end with Anling’s death, one way or the other.
The goal of the game isn’t to win through and find a safe harbor for Anling and Cody, but instead, to try and make sure Cody has the tools and knowledge to get by on his own once Anling’s out of the picture. You only have so much time, and so many resources, to accomplish that before Anling turns. It’s a bit like the original Dead Rising that way, where any given run has a built-in time limit, and it’s up to you to do as much as you can before it expires.
The basic mechanics will be familiar to you if you’ve played any recent survival game. Anling, with Cody in tow, can search her environment for useful items, such as metal scraps, bullet casings, food, and water. This much is basic stuff, where any random bit of trash you pick up has a potential use in some schematic or another. It’s a lot easier to find tainted water than drinkable stuff, for example, but you can use a couple of discarded comic books as an improvised water filter to strain out the impurities.
Notably, you don’t just escort Cody. He’s a fairly typical kid at the start of the game and follows you around, but part of the point of the game is to teach him how to defend himself, until he gets to the point where he’s a full-fledged AI partner. In addition to managing your typical hunger and thirst levels, you also need to keep an eye on Cody’s happiness. You can cheer him up and keep him motivated with a couple of comics or some candy, but if you let it drop too low, he won’t listen.
Undying’s zombies are distinctly in the Romero vein, slow-moving shamblers that are only really dangerous in numbers, but even with a gun or a decent melee weapon, Anling isn’t great in a fight. You’re better off evading and outrunning the zombies than fighting them. They’re easy enough to lose around corners, or get hung up on the far side of obstacles, but every second you’re using on zombie evasion is another second off the rest of Anling’s life. Again, much like Dead Rising, Undying is a game where the actual enemies are simply running interference for the clock.
The goal in the E3 floor demo was to find some weapons so Cody could learn how to defend himself. After a successful run through downtown, where I found some food and spare parts, I visited the local survivors’ camp and was able to salvage a couple of broken handguns from their trash. I repaired them at a workbench with some metal scraps, and could then hand one to Cody. Once equipped, he obediently shot up a handful of targets in the campground, gradually becoming more familiar and comfortable with his new gun. That achieved one of Anling’s early goals, by teaching Cody some basic self-defense, which in turn means he’ll help fight back against zombies.
The next major goal, making some medicine to hold back Anling’s infection, was a tougher sell. I’d found one half of the ingredients already, a plastic bubble pack full of sedatives, but I needed antibiotics. To get them, I’d have to visit one of the most dangerous places nearby, an overrun part of the city. There were several places like it on the world map, labeled as lethal, where the salvage was likely to be better than the penny-ante gear I’d been finding, but I was also likely to have to fight my way in with a young boy in tow.
In play, I didn’t feel like Undying did much that I hadn’t seen before in other survival games, particularly since every second game at this year’s E3 made sure to include some degree of crafting mechanic. What set it apart, though, was the soft pressure exerted by Anling’s infection. Even while I was just screwing around at workbenches, or exploring a safe area in search of items I could loot, it was always there and always ticking down. Without that meter, Undying would be a run-of-the-mill, almost boring zombie survival game; with it, there’s a constant undercurrent of tension.
The E3 build also had a handful of irritating issues that I was told would be worked on before the game came out. It’s got an okay translation that’s still clearly a work in progress, for example, and your inventory fills up very easily. You can use Cody as a pack mule, but have to constantly shift items between his inventory and Anling’s, which gets old quickly. It’s also got that old-school survival horror logic where a single bullet casing takes up as much room in your pack as a pistol, or a pint of water.
Undying, created by the Beijing-based studio Vanimals, is currently scheduled to enter Steam Early Access in early 2020, with plans to bring it to consoles eventually.
The gaming world owes so much to David Lynch. “Twin Peaks” alone has inspired the premise and setting of so many games, from Deadly Premonition to Alan Wake, and its dreamlike tone is one that’s perfect for an interactive medium.
Silver Pines, the upcoming title from Swedish-based indie developer Wych Elm, is the latest in the lineage of Lynchian games, this time presenting survival-horror-style gameplay from a 2D perspective. While I’m not traditionally as hot on 2D games, after spending time with the demo, available now on Steam, I can’t wait to see more of this intriguing new world.
It starts out simple. After a brief, narrated dream sequence, you wake up in an empty diner in the small American town of Silver Pines. There’s a quick tutorial sequence that teaches you the game’s mechanics as you escape from the diner, followed by a phone call that sets up the premise of the game. You play Red Walker, a private investigator on the hunt for a missing musician named Eddie Velvet. It’s an elegant bit of exposition that’s delivered with a slightly dreamlike vibe, setting the tone for what’s to come.
As you begin to explore the titular town, you find it eerily abandoned, thanks to an evacuation order that’s caused the majority of the residents to take the ferry out of here. Empty streets and vacant buildings bring to mind Silent Hill, which is a great start in my book. There’s something really unique and special about small town horror like this, and Silver Pines is able to capture it immediately without feeling too much like a tribute act.
Navigating the Unique 2D World of Silver Pines
One of the things that impressed me immediately was how easy I found it to navigate the 2D space. Much like the indie classic Lone Survivor, you have a map that represents the space, and you turn down streets and hallways by pressing up or down at certain openings in the background to “turn” on the map. It seems like it should be incredibly difficult to follow directional shifts like this, but it becomes immediately intuitive, especially with the addition of diegetic signage that guides you without feeling out of place and handholdy.
I usually associate 2D games with more dynamic jumping and movement mechanics, but Silver Pines keeps things grounded, managing to find ways of creating navigation challenges without resorting to platforming tests that would feel out of place in a narrative like this. The map is particularly excellent in this game, as you can use a camera to add photos to it to help remind you what’s there. I love it when main characters mark up maps with locations of puzzles or items, and putting that power in the player’s hands was an interesting mechanical wrinkle that felt helpful and unique.
The other thing that gripped me from the start was the art style, which uses a slight cel-shading technique for the character models that makes them look hand-drawn. They really pop when compared to the backgrounds, which have a slightly different, but complementary, style to them. Wych Elm also shows off a masterful understanding of lighting, creating a shadowy look that’s never too dark to understand what’s going on.
The way the various layers of background and foreground give a parallax effect as you walk adds so much depth to every moment, making the imagery feel more dynamic. This game is treading familiar ground, with abandoned hotels and empty small town streets, but the unique look sets it apart enough to justify it among its peers.
Puzzles Balance Logic and Surrealism
Aside from just navigating the spaces, you’ll need to solve a variety of puzzles in order to progress. Many of them are just finding keys to open doors or figuring out which item is helpful in which situation, like an adventure game, but there were a few in the hour-long demo that gave me a level of satisfaction in actually figuring something out. Like the best survival horror games, the puzzles are an equal bit grounded in reality and slightly surreal, adding to the tone of the game. One of them gave me a Silent Hill vibe with its logic, asking me to win a BB gun shooting range mini game to get a pool key (which also teaches you how to use weapons).
While the game isn’t crawling with enemies, there are more threats scattered throughout the levels than I expected. Early on, you get a blade to defend yourself, which also acts as a key to cut through doorways blocked by cloth, and it’s just the right balance of effective and clumsy. There’s a surprisingly useful dodge that lets you slip past enemies. With the right timing, it’s not too difficult to survive one-on-one encounters, but it’s also not so easy that you can go on autopilot. Once multiple enemies get into the mix, it starts feeling more desperate, forcing you to make smart use of your stamina and weapon durability to survive.
A pistol gets introduced late in the demo, and that also felt surprisingly punchy, but its power was balanced smartly by limited ammo. One of my favorite gameplay elements of survival horror is ammo management, and it seems like Silver Pines is going to make that a core part of its combat experience, asking you to think carefully about which enemies are worth your precious bullets. This is further complicated by the fact that your gun can also be used to shoot padlocks to access previously locked areas, making it an even more valuable resource.
Enemy Design is the Demo’s Biggest Question Mark
Ammo and tape will be crucial to the continued use of your gun and knife, respectively, and there’s a quick little minigame for reloading and repairing that adds some tension to encounters. In addition to scavenging for resources, there was a vending machine I ran across where I could spend money to buy ammo or health kits. Be careful, though, the money is what you use to save at the payphone save points, so you don’t want to spend it all. It’s a clever variant on the classic Resident Evil-style ink ribbon system that makes your resource for saving a more abundant currency, but one that is used for more than just saving.
There were a couple of mementos that I ran across while exploring, and these can be equipped to provide specific character modifiers. I’m not entirely sold on the system yet, as there weren’t enough in the demo to really be able to craft a meaningful build, but with the surprisingly fun combat I’ve seen so far, I’m hoping that they will allow you to shape your playstyle in a way that’s tuned to how you like it. Any new wrinkles on combat are welcome, as it will need to find ways to keep fresh if it wants to stay compelling throughout.
As much as I think the combat is responsive and interesting, I think the enemies might be the weakest part of the game’s identity. This could also be a symptom of just seeing the early game, but so far, they are a bit more indistinct than I’d like, consisting mostly of shadowy people and bugs that didn’t have much going on. There was a boss fight that had a bit more of a menacing design, but I don’t know enough about the full shape of the narrative yet to see if the enemy design is in sync with the tone it’s trying to achieve. Right now, they just feel a bit generic, but I’m hoping things improve as it goes on, because they are pretty fun to fight for a survival horror game.
A Strong First Impression
Back to the opening thoughts about Lynch, the part that has me most interested in this game is the narrative. It’s simple so far, but there have been some surprisingly effective surrealist sequences that make me think this story is going to be something that will sink its hooks into me. One of the coolest moments of the demo involved turning off a light switch and being transported into an entirely different space, one dripping with dreamlike vibes. Even the choice to have the person you’re searching for be a musician adds a nice bit of texture to the narrative, putting a thematic focus on the game’s music in an important sequence involving a performance.
The cutscenes shift to a distinct painterly style, making them stand out without having to animate them, and it’s all brought to life with great voice acting. There’s even a little show you can watch in bits on TVs you pass, feeling a bit like a nod to Alan Wake II’s “Night Springs”.
I’m going to be honest, watching the initial trailer for Silver Pines had me feeling a bit sceptical. Not everyone can nail that Lynchian vibe, and when you try for that tone and miss, it can leave you with a narrative that’s either confusing or pretentious. Based on my hour with Silver Pines, I’d say they are on the right track, ready to deliver a surrealist narrative that draws from its inspirations while still carving out its own identity.
No word on the release date yet, outside of a vague 2026 timeframe, but I’ll be there day one to check it out.
Silver Pines is scheduled to release on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.
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