Welcome to NOLA.
It's The Walking Dead. In VR. Of course you're gonna see some nightmarish stuff.
Base Game
- The lighting in this game is excellent at portraying just how dark it is in some areas. Rampart High, for example, is almost pitch black with its twisting hallways making it incredibly disorienting.
- Rampart High as a whole is when the game really starts to show the "horror" part of "survival-horror". Up until this point in the game, most of the locales you visit are well-lit enough that you can at least see what's in front of you, and the areas where you can't are typically short trips. Rampart High on the other hand is almost exclusively an indoor level, with long, dark corridors you can rarely ever see the end of, and there aren't many windows to provide natural light. Worse, the walkers in there are astoundingly quiet, and if you're especially unlucky, you won't get a Scare Chord to warn you of impending doom. Not helping matters is how quiet the place is, meaning when something inevitably does interrupt the silence, it'll make you jump for sure.
- The whole damn game, really, is one long test of your limits if you're afraid of the dark. While the aforementioned Rampart High is the darkest level in the game, every other level has massive sections of indoor areas that become intensely claustrophobic with how dark it is.
- The catacombs beneath the graveyard, which lead to the churchyard and the final Reserve pump, are pitch black, are filled with decayed skeletons, and have walkers in them. It's Paranoia Fuel how close this is to your home base.
- If you don't kill Henri when he turns, they will return as a walker... In the middle of your fucking camp. Since this is supposed to be the one place that walkers absolutely cannot get to, it's a nasty shock.
- The walkers are especially creepy up close, even if only a couple at a time are relatively easy to take care of. They have blank, unflinching eyes, and if they aren't a freshly made walker, they're decayed beyond belief.
- Y'know how in The Last of Us Part II there's a cult that disembowels people while hanging them with their corpses on display? Well, that happens here, too, albeit without the disemboweling, and instead hanging them by their feet. It's not uncommon to come across so many hanging walkers, struggling to get free. You CAN put them out of their misery, though.
- Walker's heads will continue to move if they're decapitated without having their brain destroyed. Helplessly chomping at nothing and rolling their eyes around, unable to do anything.
- Pretty much the entire period after the bell is rung in an area, simply because of how it steadily goes From Bad to Worse the longer you're out.
- Upon the bells being rung, any and all survivors in the area all just bail wordlessly. Like every single one of them knows what's about to happen, and without a word, they all fucking run.
- At first, it's maybe a small amount more walkers than you're used to... But then there's more, and more, and more, even some near the boat areas that are normally free of walkers. And considering that you have limited stamina, ammo, and weapon durability, if you don't get to the boat in time, you're screwed.
- Anytime a walker busts through a door is some high-octane shit. You'd think there would be a bit more of a warning, like maybe some pounding against the door or something, but no, one minute its a perfectly mundane door, the next its flung open (or just plain torn down) and you've got a walker right in front of you ready to chomp.
- Since this is The Walking Dead, you're able to cover yourself in walker guts, blending into the crowds of walkers. Sounds easy, but a few small things make doing this incredibly risky, and incredibly tense.
- Firstly, you cannot sprint. Sprinting immediately alerts the walkers of your presence and removes the effect. So you need to walk through a horrifying amount of walkers that can all turn on you if you aren't careful. Oh, and while your walking speed is usually totally fine, it can feel agonizingly slow during these sequences.
- Second, you cannot use weapons. While using a weapon does not remove the effect like sprinting does, it does alert any and all walkers who see you use a weapon to your presence.
- Third, the way the screen goes blood red, flies swarm you, your footsteps are wet and mushy, and the fact that your arms are absolutely fucking coated in blood make the experience immensely unpleasant, even before the other two factors.
- Casey's backstory. Pressured by his squadmates to kill innocent people seeking aid, he's become a nervous wreck. Upon speaking to him about it, he mentions several small details, like a hat that reminded him of the hat his uncle wore that was shot off a man's head, a cross being splintered and torn apart by bullets, blood falling to the ground alongside the sounds of bodies hitting the ground, and how all but one of his squadmates seemed perfectly fine with what they were doing, with one of them SMILING. Poor guy's been through a lot.
- During the climax, if you or May ring the bell, a huge swarm of walkers come out and massacre the Tower and Reclaimed forces fighting outside. The sound design does an excellent job at reflecting how awful the slaughter is, with desperate screams and cringe-inducing crunch and blood sound effects. And then the blood starts pooling through the door. It's a lot of fucking blood. It gives you a very good idea of the suffering that was just caused. Worse, if Casey is still alive, this triggers his PTSD of his military squadmates massacring the desperate civilians.
- Speaking of that massacre, you get to see the aftermath of that all throughout the area. It's pretty much as bad as you'd expect.
- So, you beat the game! Congratulations. You've gotten a ton of supplies on your latest run, are heading back to your home base, and now there's a squad of Tower troops in your base, ready to gun you down.
Aftershocks
- The first thing you hear upon beginning Aftershocks is someone pleading for their life over the radio, with them specifically stating that something happened to their legs. At the end of your first mission, you meet him. He's been dead for a while, and his legs have been blown off by one of the makeshift bombs littering the place.
