NOTE: There are spoilers ahead for every game discussed in this feature.

Stray Souls

In Stray Souls you’ll take control of unremarkable teenager Daniel who moves into the dreary town of Aspen Falls after inheriting his recently deceased grandmother’s house. The prospect of a Silent Hill-alike was certainly enticing, but Stray Souls fluffs its lines by being a little too cookie-cutter. It certainly doesn’t nail the psychological trauma element it’s aiming for as Daniel’s actions and those of accompanying Martha can’t easily be explained. All this creepy stuff is happening, but they don’t seem phased at all. The spectre of Daniel’s grandma torments him, but why? Martha gives Daniel a gun, somehow? By the end, the lore is explained by a random note found in a police station. See, Daniel has ‘The Darkness’, with his grandmother’s haunting causing all the strange monsters to appear in Aspen Falls and the surrounding forest. Oh, and there’s a cult. It’s as inconsequential a backstory imaginable with zero context to explain the scary stuff happening despite its best efforts.

Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty

Soulslike Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty has a lot to like: it’s an inviting spin on FromSoftware’s blueprint with the challenge of certain encounters indicated to the player before engaging, saving them needless frustration, and a streamlined combat system forgoing the mental gymnastics required with Team Ninja’s other Soulslike Nioh. The story overall has merit too, telling a complex tale of multiple parties vying for control of an all-powerful magical elixir. It’s just that, the ending just… happens, with minimal challenge. The final three bosses are much easier than the side-quest boss Zhang Liao for instance, for once you’ve mastered deflecting his lightning-fast attacks, the remaining bosses are a walk in the park.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Numerous complaints surround the brevity of Call of Duty’s Modern Warfare 3 and its controversial open combat missions. That said, the Modern Warfare 3’s villainous Vladimir Makarov hatches a plan to blow up the Channel Tunnel between England and France, with Task Force 141 fighting for their lives to defuse the bomb and eliminate the terrorists. Thing is, there’s no jeopardy; we know Task Force 141 will succeed – albeit, as it happens, at a cost – but perhaps others who’ve suggested Makarov should be victorious have a point. This resolution would set up a true cliff-hanger. As it happens, Task Force 141 learn of Makarov’s latest scheme and thwart it within minutes. Makarov could be portrayed as a major evildoer, but Modern Warfare 3 instead prefers to depict him as an easily beatable, cartoonish villain.

Daymare 1994: Sandcastle

The story-driven survival horror prequel to Daymare: 1998 features a host of deadly enemies, tense encounters, and niggling environmental puzzles. The plot itself however is a befuddling mess, poorly paced acted out by largely unlikeable characters. There’s no motivation established for the character’s actions; it’s a feeling of procession as player-character Dahlia Reyes delves deeper into the not-so-surprising underground secret base. And the ending, whereby Dahlia is telepathically persuaded by her sister Helen to inject herself with the final sample of Ogre blood to presumably survive teleportation is too ambiguous. Why would she do this? Is Helen speaking under the influence of the ogre? How is Reyes even hearing her in the first place?

Quantum Error

Developer TeamKill Media should be applauded for their ambition; attempting to meld first and third-person action, cosmic shooting, and horror, all through the lens of a firefighter can’t have been easy, but alas the results of Quantum Error make all their efforts somewhat misdirected. Front and centre is the game’s convoluted story, masterfully failing to make sense of its dimension hopping, planet spanning madness. The story is told through poorly directed cinematics to boot, with surprise cutscenes interjecting the gameplay. It tries to do too much, and by game’s end its impossible to make sense of the events that have transpired.

Amnesia: The Bunker

The Bunker is a smaller scale Amnesia experience, with an underdeveloped story to go with it. It’s possible Frictional opted to tell a story lighter on lore to fit the overall more refined experience, but the plot is guessable, full of red herrings and unnecessary distraction. The biggest diversion though is that player-character Henri’s amnesia doesn’t have any relevance at all. He didn’t forget, he was simply in unconscious when all the scary stuff started materialising. The ‘bad thing’ that he did was to cheat at poker to avoid partaking in a night-time patrol. An innocuous undertaking for the usually decent Henri; had he not cheated and gone on patrol himself, the events of the game – kickstarted by Lambert consuming the mysterious spring water – would likely have happened anyway.

Greyhill Incident

Owing to Greyhill Incident’s cliché story, underbaked characters, murky visuals, tepid gameplay, and extreme brevity, it’s premature ending might be its saving grace. The game’s only serviceable character Ryan is on a mission to save his son Henry from the clutches of the sinister greys, who for the game’s handful of hour runtime skulk nonchalantly through the rural farmland Ryan calls home. To save his son, he must be abducted. And… that’s it. We don’t see Ryan’s fate. Does he save Henry? Does he survive? Has his consciousness been transferred to his dog? Greyhill Incident’s climactic abruptness leaves too many pesky questions.

The Walking Dead: Destinies

It’s bad enough that The Walking Dead: Destinies has some of the most horrendous gameplay, stealth, writing, visuals, and cutscenes ever put into video game format. Yet somehow, for a game about your choices having an impact, it manages to have the same ending scenarios for Shane and Rick. The same attack on the prison with a tank (with Merle as the villain for Rick and the Governer for Shane). The same choice leads to either Glen or Michonne dying. Even the same fight in the circle of fire. The same bland evacuation from the prison, with either Shane or Rick leaving separately with Carl. It just comes down to which characters you’d like to see appearing in the same terrible ending rather than your choices having any meaning. At least Rick’s path has Carol 1v1ing a tank with an assault rifle, which is hilarious.

Flashback 2

This long-awaited sequel to the 16-bit classic has its fair share of problems. If you managed to get through to the end, well done you, as not only was there clunky combat, cliched atmosphere, lacklustre missions, and boring, blurry level design to lumber through, there was an unfathomable number of technical deficiencies which broke the game, meaning finishing it was an impossible endeavour anyway. Much like the original, protagonist Conrad is working to thwart an alien invasion, but the settings and story beats rarely deviate. It’s an execution so tepid that you’ll probably not even care what happens come the game’s end. Flashback 2 is a sequel we did not need.

Sonic Superstars

As with all 2D Sonic the Hedgehog games, story is told in between-level cutscenes. Except, in Sonic Superstars – the return to side-scrolling Sonic many long-term fans hoped would be a spiritual successor to Sonic Mania – even between-level cutscenes can’t explain all the crazy goings on in the Blue Blur’s latest adventure. Of the game’s multiple narratives, the Last Story is the most perplexing, with the release of a dragon, the origin of which is remarkably unclear. Eggman’s use of time manipulation is never explained either. A dumbfounding conclusion to an underwhelming Sonic game.

The Walking Dead: Destinies – published by GameMill Entertainment, the same company that also inflicted the aforementioned Skull Island on gaming audiences – is an unequivocal mess. Even the most disastrous of games often have at least some redeeming qualities, but I struggle to find any of them here. On a conceptual level, Destinies has an intriguing premise, but it fails in executing even its most fundamental and basic ideas so spectacularly, it almost doesn’t feel like it’s worth it to talk about how it fumbles the relatively more ambitious ones.

"There have been quite a few notable contenders for the ignominious “worst game of 2023” crown, games that have not only failed, but failed so spectacularly that the masses have been forced to sit up and take notice. And I’m afraid to say that another game has just joined that list."

The Walking Dead: Destinies covers the first three and a half seasons of the once-acclaimed TV show, starting with Rick Grimes waking up from a coma in a hospital that’s been overrun by the undead, and ending with the Governor’s attack on the prison. Its biggest hook is letting you make key decisions during certain points of the story, theoretically allowing you to chart a very different tale from the one that plays out in the show, including completely changing the fates of several characters based on your decisions.

On paper, that’s certainly an intriguing premise, but The Walking Dead: Destinies implements it in the most vapid, uninteresting way possible. Who lives and who dies has little to no impact on how the main story plays out. The important events that happened in the show are going to happen regardless, with some variations from time to time, and by and large, the only thing your decisions will change is the characters that will be present for those events. Even calling what the game does with its central hook the bare minimum would be a charitable description.

It doesn’t help that in virtually every aspect of the storytelling department, The Walking Dead: Destinies keeps falling flat on its face. The vast majority of cutscenes are little more than series of still images with voiceovers, and somehow, even they manage to be horribly awkward and stilted. The voice acting does the game no favours either, with every single character managing to sound embarrassingly awful so consistently that it would almost be impressive if it weren’t so painful to listen to. Meanwhile, across its brief runtime, the game also rushes through the story way too quickly, often cutting out crucial sequences or entire characters who, in the show, were very much part of the main cast. Even for the most dedicated Walking Dead fans, there’s little of value to be found here.

Where the moment-to-moment action is concerned, The Walking Dead: Destinies blends stealth and combat in linear missions, though both those aspects are incredibly barebones. Where stealth is concerned, bugs frequently mar the experience, from enemies being able to see you when they shouldn’t (or not being able to see you when they should) to prompts for stealth kills often only appearing at oddly specific angles. Even when things do work as intended, it’s incredibly easy to cheese enemies and lure them towards you one-by-one from a distance, thanks to which a feeling of repetition quickly sets in.

"Who lives and who dies has little to no impact on how the main story plays out. The important events that happened in the show are going to happen regardless, with some variations from time to time, and by and large, the only thing your decisions will change is the characters that will be present for those events."

Combat isn’t much better either, especially if it’s the melee combat you’re talking about, which is thanks in large part to the game’s oddly stringent implementation of a stamina bar. Even on the default difficulty, taking out a single enemy can fully deplete your stamina, which means you’re forced to distance yourself from your foes and wait a couple of seconds while your stamina recovers before you can move in for the next kill. Rather than allowing you to plow through enemies with different melee weapons, the game forces you to step back after virtually every kill, which, as you might imagine, quickly becomes frustrating. Admittedly, things are a little better where the shooting mechanics are concerned, but the most that can be said about them is that they’re not completely broken and work the way you would expect from any game that has third-person shooting.

But even that tiniest of potential victories isn’t allowed to be a mini-saving grace, because every single combat encounter in The Walking Dead: Destinies feels like an absolute chore. For the most part, the game’s idea of difficulty is to blame for that, because any time it wants to ramp up the challenge, it does so in the cheapest way possible, and just chucks a truckload of enemies at you, which only serves to highlight the game’s moment-to-moment mechanical issues that much more.

Even in a much better game, that sort of difficulty can be frustrating, but here, it almost feels like excessive punishment for a crime you didn’t commit. Simple movement feels awkward and sluggish, not just because the controls are as clunky as they are, but also because of smaller issues that add up to cause frequent frustration, like coming to an abrupt dead stop while running away from a horde of walkers because you touched the geometry of a small object. By throwing a bunch of enemies at you in the name of challenge, the only thing The Walking Dead: Destinies does is blast a bright spotlight on those core issues.

On a visual and technical level, the game is just as much of a mess as it is everywhere else. From the ugliest possible faces I’ve seen in a game in a long, long time to the bland and muddy environments to the choppy and janky animations across the board, The Walking Dead: Destinies feels so technically bankrupt, it would have caught flak for its deficiencies in this area even if it had released twenty years ago. There’s no shortage of glitches either, from entire sections being completely devoid of any enemies when they clearly shouldn’t be to the kind of bugs that can block progress. I don’t want to be too harsh with my criticism here, because clearly, this was a game built on a tiny budget by a small team, and obviously, no one should have been going into it with high expectations anyway, given the fact that the publisher, GameMill Entertainment, isn’t exactly known for putting out the most polished or well-produced games. But looking at what’s on offer here, where not even the bare minimum is being accomplished, I find it difficult to cut the game any kind of slack.

"The Walking Dead: Destinies feels so technically bankrupt, it would have caught flak for its deficiencies in this area even if it had released twenty years ago."

Quite frequently, we hear people wondering how certain games were allowed to get past quality control and be released to world, and though often there’s at least a hint of exaggeration in that notion, in the case of The Walking Dead: Destinies, even that criticism doesn’t fully capture the depths the game sinks to. Somehow, with all of the game’s many, many issues, GameMill Entertainment has the audacity to price it at $50, which should tell you all you need to know about how much the publisher was concerned with delivering a product that was actually fun in even the most superficial way possible.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox Series X.

Rather than following the original comic series, The Walking Dead: Destinies is instead based on AMC’s adaptation of The Walking Dead on TV. The game puts players in scenes from the show, giving them complete freedom to take on different situations in different ways.

On the gameplay side of things, The Walking Dead: Destinies is a third-person action-adventure game. The title kicks things off by putting players in the shoes of Rick Grimes as he explores a hospital filled with Walkers. Grimes will have to assemble allies as he makes his way through iconic locations from the TV show, including Atlanta, the Greene Family Farm, and the prison.

A PC release of The Walking Dead: Destinies is planned for December 1.

The Walking Dead: Destinies is a narrative-focused third-person game that puts players in the shoes of a number of characters from the TV show. Starting things off as Rick Grimes, players will be able to assemble allies and fight their way through the apocalypse.

The game also features moments where players can make important choices which might end up changing how the story plays out. Locations from the show will be present in the game, including Atlanta, the Greene family farm, the prison, and Woodbury.

The Walking Dead: Destinies was announced back in August. Publisher GameMill has previously stated that the title will feature more than a dozen characters from the show, including Michonne, Shane, and Carol, with each character having their own unique abilities and arsenals.

"We wrote all the decisions, the story and dialogues keeping the characters true to themselves, while focusing the What If scenarios on how the player’s decisions impact and change their world and generate new decisions down the road."

A “what if” style Walking Dead experience is an inherently intriguing concept- how did that idea first come about?

Watching the show as a fan, I always thought of The Walking Dead as an IP that is all about its characters, their relationships and their decisions in an unforgiving world. And constantly I wondered about their decisions and the butterfly effect of those. Which sparked an idea: what if we could create a game in The Walking Dead universe where you could change those decisions, perhaps save your favorite character’s life? I’m pretty excited about the variety of scenarios that players will be able to craft as they explore the story of the show.

Just how significantly will players be able to take the story off its “canon” route, so to speak, with their choices? Where those narrative branches are concerned, how did you go about writing scenarios that felt impactful, but still felt like they fit nicely in the story?

When dealing with incredible, huge IPs such as The Walking Dead, it is super important to consider all stakeholders of the project: the awesome and passionate fanbase; the original material from the show; and the characters themselves and their expected behaviors. For example, you can’t expect Shane to be super soft, or Merle to be a kind team player. So we wrote all the decisions, the story and dialogues keeping the characters true to themselves, while focusing the What If scenarios on how the player’s decisions impact and change their world and generate new decisions down the road. And then it was just a matter of making sure characters were reacting to these new circumstances in a way that was true to their nature. We worked really hard with AMC to be 100% true to the show’s roots while still providing something fresh and unique for players trying out decisions that go in a different route than the show did.

You’ve said that The Walking Dead: Destinies will allow players to visit a number of familiar locations from throughout the show’s first four seasons. In those locations, how much freedom will players be afforded to explore and take in everything at their own pace?

While the game is not open-word, it features 23 handcrafted levels ordered episodically, from the Memorial Hospital to Woodbury, designed to allow for both stealth and guns-blazing approaches. Some levels are more action-packed, some are more story-driven. We worked to make them very similar to the show, but also opted to make some adjustments to empower gameplay and make it as fun as possible to get through these iconic landmarks. Personally, I love when you get to the West Georgia Correctional Facility. Really brings back some memories!

"While the game is not open-word, it features 23 handcrafted levels ordered episodically, from the Memorial Hospital to Woodbury, designed to allow for both stealth and guns-blazing approaches."

What can players expect from the combat in The Walking Dead: Destinies and its core mechanics, especially where things like weapon and enemy variety are concerned?

The concept of the game’s combat system is really based on the show, and quite straightforward: the player is very powerful against a single walker. They should do okay against two. But if you’re facing three or more, things can get really messy, really quick, so you’d better watch out and avoid that.

Stabbing walkers in the brain is one of the trademark moves of TWD, so it is at the core of the game’s combat too: you can stab any walker as long as they are stunned or unaware. This blends seamlessly with melee weapon attacks, in a 1-2 combo that feels super satisfying.

There are a variety of melee weapons such as baseball bats, crowbars, sledgehammers and, of course, a katana, with different movesets, combos, special skills, damage and reach. Players will be able to improve their performance on each with special skills unlocked as they progress in the game.

And there is gunplay: firearms such as the revolvers, shotguns or assault rifles are powerful, yet noisy. If you decide to take a shot, you’ll have to brace yourself for a tough fight from the other enemies – unless you’re using a certain crossbow.

From the enemies’ perspective, we’ve got some unique walkers, including walkers that explode, walkers that creep across the ground, walkers that make extra noise while you’re fighting them, and larger more challenging ones. There are also human enemies and boss fights; after all, it’s all about killing the dead, fearing the living.

If players want to take a completely stealth-driven approach, will the game allow that?

Yes, that is heavily encouraged! Essentially, stealth approaches are something the characters really do a lot during the show, so the game wants to stay true to that. The walkers have strength in numbers, so keeping a low profile is key to a smooth progression through the game.

What was behind the decision to focus purely on the first four seasons of the show?

We actually considered doing more seasons at one point in the project – like I mentioned, I personally really wanted to save Beth. But at the end of the day, we wanted to focus on crafting the best TWD experience that we can, and we decided that it means a more detailed, deep dive into these rich, awesome arcs that include Rick and Shane and Woodbury, as opposed to rushing through content. Even so, we still set to cover a 40+ episode span, so we still had to make some tough choices and cuts to keep the game focused on the stories and characters that we feel are the coolest for fans to experience.

How significantly will all the playable characters differ from each other where their abilities are concerned and in terms of how they’ll change up the experience?

We have created a character-driven skill system that is shared by the whole party, but is tied to who is a) in your party and b) alive. This means the “What If” choices also impact gameplay! For example: You need Shane to be alive and in your party to unlock some abilities from his tree. If you chose Rick over him, you won’t be able to unlock the “Bogo” skill, that makes shotgun shells go through the first enemy, hitting the ones behind them. This brings an extra layer to the decision-making in the game!

"The concept of the game’s combat system is really based on the show, and quite straightforward: the player is very powerful against a single walker. They should do okay against two. But if you’re facing three or more, things can get really messy, really quick, so you’d better watch out and avoid that."

What can you tell us about the game’s resource management aspects? How much of an emphasis will be placed on things such as scavenging for resources or conserving ammo?

We wanted to focus players on experiencing more of the action and story of the show than a variety of resource management. There is absolutely a component of ammo scarcity within each level and conserving bullets, plus the danger of being swarmed by walkers as you use firearms, but we do not focus on resource scarcity such as food, water or other resources.

Roughly how long will an average playthrough of the game be?

According to our tests, an average player should be able to complete one playthrough of the game in around 7-8 hours, while a completionist should spend around 11-12. And that scales up real quick if the player wants to try other choices in the branching narrative of the game.

What frame rate and resolution will the game target on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S?

It will be 4K at 60 FPS on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and 1080p at 30 FPS on PS4 and Xbox One.

What frame rate and resolution will the game target on the Switch in docked and undocked modes?

720p at 30 FPS in both modes.

The Walking Dead: Destinies will put players in the shoes of various characters throughout the show’s first four seasons, where they will get to make choices that might end up changing how the story plays out. The title starts out with players taking on the role of Rick Grimes. Players will get to visit important locations from the show, like Woodbury, the prison, and the Greene farm.

According to publisher GameMill Entertainment, The Walking Dead: Destinies will feature more than a dozen characters from the TV series, including fan-favourites like Daryl, Michonne, Shane, and Carol. Each character will have their own unique skills, abilities, and arsenals, which players will have to make use of to make it through the game’s harrowing events.