While the big selling point of The Walking Dead: Destinies is the ability to choose who lives or dies, it's important that the actual gameplay is able to match its storytelling experience, at least to some degree. That was definitely the intent, game director at Flux Games Paulo Luis Santos, tells Game ZXC during an interview. The Walking Dead: Destinies' combat is modeled after the TV show, meaning players can take on one walker easily, two shouldn't be too challenging, but more than that (especially swarms) are a completely different story.
To complement the gameplay, The Walking Dead: Destinies features a "stress system" meant to add an extra layer of pressure and survivability to the game. After all, one thing that elevated the TV show was the very real possibility of anyone dying at almost any point, and the stress system helps drive that point home.
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As Santos explains it, taking too much damage in the game triggers a near-death state called "Broken." The result is the Walking Dead: Destinies character losing their mind and changing gameplay dramatically to survive, and should players do the latter, a second wind returns to gameplay to normal, but with a catch.
"That stressful experience leaves the character with a Scar, which slightly debuffs them and can be healed by performing other actions in the game. For reference, Scars are pretty similar to the Malfunctions in Returnal."
What Scars do exactly, how many players can have, and so forth are things players will need to wait for The Walking Dead: Destinies' release date to discover, but the Returnal comparison should help a lot. Returnal Malfunctions are gained by interacting with Malignant objects, which can result in reduced weapon damage, increased cooldowns, scrambled maps, extra damage from certain sources, and so forth. They are removed by killing hostiles, collecting certain things, using keys, or a number of other possible tasks. In other words, it's clear that The Walking Dead: Destinies' stress system raises the stakes, and while it may be useful in a pinch, the scar it leaves behind could put the player at further risk. It remains to be seen exactly what those actions are and how stressful, genuinely, the stress system is.
But it's nice to know that, even on a gameplay level, The Walking Dead: Destinies closely adheres to the survival themes of the show, despite not being a survival game in and of itself.
The Walking Dead: Destinies is set to release on November 14 for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
