This was another side effect of bored video game rentals. I picked this up alongside Rise of Kong and another rubbish game (to be covered in the future) and immediately knew I wanted to do an episode on just how much this game sucked. The obvious counterpoint to this was Telltale’s Walking Dead, which in my mind is the high point of the entire franchise. I opted to just use season one because (1) it’s the best season and (2) comparing 42 hours worth of the complete collection to 11 hours of Destinies didn’t seem fair, and it was already going to be a one-sided fight.
I wanted to riff on Telltale’s Walking Dead story a little, so I went with the farm setting to start out as that was my favourite section in season one. I decided to refer back to the Stardew episode in the intro, just a little.
Another idea that intrigued me from Walking Dead Season 1 was the idea of a gang of psychopath bandits hiding out in an abandoned supermarket. I took that set-up and mixed in some The Last of Us into it, with a hyper religious cult operating inside. The creepy supermarket sequence was a pretty tall order, given how many characters I’d written into it, but I really liked the mini lore I wrote up for this cult – where they believed behaving like the dead would disguise them from the curse and prevent them from turning into zombies for real. Doing the stupid voices for the meeting was a lot of fun and murder on my throat, but I was happy with how it came together.
As soon as I’d decided to do another zombie themed episode, I knew I was going to riff on the ending of Night of the Living Dead right up to the point where I sampled the final dialogue.
This was a really well received episode on release and I have no idea how, the listener count was higher than any other episode, so that means some people jumped into the show JUST for this episode. Weird way to start out but it didn’t seem to translate into a noticeable uptick in listeners elsewhere. Which is fine, this is a marathon and not a sprint, a concept as niche as this is not going to take off quickly. I am always going to plug away until things improve, and I always make sure to put maximum effort in, regardless of how small the potential audience is.