The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct – Longplay

Thursday nights had been Stardew Valley for almost a year, so this was a deliberate change of pace: an older Xbox 360 game, one full playthrough, and a title I used to know well enough to finish in roughly 40 minutes.

That confidence started disappearing before we had even properly begun. The capture card had decided not to cooperate with OBS, the copyrighted Walking Dead theme meant muting the game during parts of the introduction, and once we finally got moving it became obvious that a decade away had removed rather more of those old routes from my memory than expected.

What was supposed to be a quick return to familiar territory became more than three hours of Walkers, fuel shortages, dead batteries, questionable stealth and 15 Deathloops.

🎮 About the Game

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is a first-person action game set during the early days of the Walker outbreak. It acts as a prequel to The Walking Dead television series and puts us in control of Daryl Dixon as he travels through the Georgia countryside alongside his brother Merle.

The aim is to make it toward the supposed safety of Atlanta, but getting there means choosing routes, finding fuel and vehicles, gathering supplies and dealing with the Walkers between us and the next destination. Those route and resource choices also mean a playthrough can change depending on where you decide to go.

🧭 Where We Are in the Journey

This wasn’t another chapter in an ongoing run. The plan was to start Survival Instinct and complete the entire game in a single stream, using it to begin a break from our usual Thursday Stardew Valley sessions.

I had played the game heavily back around its original release and remembered being able to fly through it. This time we were effectively rediscovering it as we went. Some locations gradually came back to me, while others felt completely unfamiliar until I had already taken the wrong door.

🔪 What Happens in This Episode

Things started with capture-card problems, copyrighted music that needed muting, and the dangerous confidence of someone convinced he still remembered a decade-old speedrun route. Back when I was playing Survival Instinct regularly, I knew the maps well enough to get through the entire game in roughly 40 minutes. This time, I could remember just enough to know that shortcuts existed, but not necessarily where they were.

Once Daryl got hold of the powerful machete unlocked on my old save, the evening found its soundtrack: “stabby stabby,” “slicey slicey,” and the occasional Walker head disappearing into the scenery. Firearms were available, of course, but why ruin perfectly good stealth with bullets? At least, that was the theory.

The first proper stop quickly turned into a hunt for fuel. We met Jimmy Blake, one of the last local officers still trying to hold things together, and picked up a side objective involving survivors scattered around the town. Warren, trapped near the petrol station, offered a more immediate solution to our increasingly thirsty vehicle: find the keys, get the generator running, and he could get the pumps working again.

That sent us through the police station looking for batteries and supplies while trying not to wake every Walker in the building. There was another survivor locked inside who wanted food from the general store, although his problems were eventually filed under “somebody else can deal with that.” The more useful prize was the equipment we needed to get the petrol station running.

Starting the generator, unsurprisingly, removed any remaining possibility of a quiet exit. The noise dragged Walkers in from everywhere, the petrol stop rapidly became a zombie magnet, and the sensible survival strategy became getting back to the truck as quickly as possible while leaving everyone else to work out their own evacuation arrangements.

From there, the road itself became one of the biggest threats to the run.

Travelling between the major locations consumes fuel, and choosing the highway saves petrol but brings its own little surprises whenever the vehicle decides it has had enough. Batteries failed. Fuel ran low. New vehicles were required. What should have been a quick journey repeatedly dumped us into roadside areas where Daryl had to search through garages, campsites and abandoned buildings just to keep moving.

One battery hunt turned particularly messy when the Walkers started grabbing Daryl one after another. Once one of them got hold of him, another was never far behind, turning the encounter into what I described as the ending of Despicable Me — except instead of Gru being hugged by Minions, Daryl was receiving an increasingly unwanted group embrace from the undead.

That was also where our interpretation of “stealth” began to attract attention from chat.

I maintained that we were doing things quietly. Chat observed that we were sprinting through areas with Walkers following close behind, occasionally firing guns, attracting entire groups and generally leaving a suspicious amount of destruction in our wake. Vvoornth eventually summed the situation up with, “You don’t know what stealth means,” followed immediately by, “I rest my case.”

My counterargument was simple: if nobody survives to tell anyone you were there, technically nobody saw you.

The journey eventually took us into a dark campground where the vehicle had once again decided that functioning was optional. We found a sheriff who pointed us toward a ranger station and the keys to another vehicle, although finding those keys involved wandering around in the dark while trying to remember a level I once knew perfectly. In classic fashion, they turned out to be sitting somewhere considerably more obvious than the route I had been searching.

The middle of the game became a mixture of survivor errands, roadside scavenging and old memories slowly returning. Scout sent us looking for Mia, who was trapped inside a theatre while a sniper made the surrounding streets extremely dangerous. Reaching her meant getting through the theatre, clearing enough of the route for her to escape and then heading back toward Scout.

Naturally, none of that remained simple for very long.

There were packed streets, Walkers appearing from unexpected corners and a growing suspicion that reporting back to Scout was going to create another problem. The stream’s vocabulary remained remarkably consistent throughout: if something moved, “stabby stabby”; if the machete connected particularly well, “off with his head”; and if everything suddenly went wrong, there was a very good chance Gary was about to be blamed for it.

Chat supplied its own running commentary. A discussion about a zombie “herd” somehow became an Amber Heard joke, followed by “that’s hearsay,” while EntertainJD admitted the whole thing had put an “Objection, Hearsay” song in his head. Conversations wandered through Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Z Nation, The Walking Dead TV series, Firefly, Red Dwarf and whatever else happened to come up while Daryl briefly had enough breathing room to avoid being eaten.

Meanwhile, #Deathloop had become the unofficial scoring system for the evening. Whenever Daryl went down — or looked particularly committed to doing so — another one was added. At one point tictaqjim responded to a particularly questionable decision with “did you seriously just do that?”, followed by “focus man” and “nearly strangled you on that!!”

We were also joined by raids from airstrike83rp and later daftphoenix9024, both arriving during the increasingly chaotic second half of the run. New arrivals therefore received a fairly accurate introduction to the evening: an old Xbox 360 game, a disappearing memory of the optimal route, a machete doing most of the work and a vehicle apparently held together with batteries and optimism.

Fuel became a recurring enemy in its own right. Several journeys ended with another search for petrol, often just enough to reach the next stop before the game demanded more. By that stage I was beginning to suspect that repeatedly replacing the battery probably wasn’t solving the actual mechanical problem, and somebody in the apocalypse might eventually want to investigate the alternator.

The story eventually brought Daryl back to Merle, which also brought one of the rougher stretches of the entire stream. I remembered Merle as exactly the sort of character you were supposed to find irritating, and he wasted very little time reminding us why.

More importantly, Daryl lost his equipment.

That meant our reliable machete was suddenly gone and the immediate priority became getting it back. With very little health, plenty of Walkers and a route that was only vaguely returning to memory, the area became a genuine Deathloop problem. Several attempts turned into frantic runs through crowded rooms, trying to isolate individual zombies, recover the gear and avoid getting chain-grabbed before Daryl could stabilise.

Eventually the machete was back where it belonged, and the journey could continue.

By then, the original idea of a quick 40-minute nostalgia run had completely disappeared. We kept pushing toward the evacuation point, dealing with more roadside breakdowns, more batteries, more fuel searches and increasingly familiar pieces of levels that seemed determined to return to memory about thirty seconds after they would have been useful.

The final destination was the evacuation stadium, where the game stopped pretending things might remain under control.

Getting inside meant navigating another packed route while the evacuation announcements continued around us. Once through, Daryl had to protect the remaining survivors as Walkers poured into the area. The machete finally gave way to something considerably louder as the fight turned into repeated bursts of gunfire, desperate reloads and attempts to use explosive barrels to thin the crowd.

Several more Deathloops followed.

Eventually we reached the part I genuinely did remember: the machine-gun turret.

At that point subtlety officially left the building. The turret roared into life, Walkers came flooding toward the position, and if they somehow hadn’t known where we were before, they certainly did now. After spending most of the stream insisting that we were attempting stealth, finishing the final battle behind a weapon loud enough to alert half of Georgia felt strangely appropriate.

The defence finally held, the route opened and Daryl made it to the helicopter. It looked as though the evacuation was finally going to work — until Merle arrived.

Rather than leave his brother behind, Daryl abandoned the flight and went with him instead, bringing the story to its conclusion. The credits rolled, the game was complete, and the final Deathloop count reached 15.

So much for 40 minutes.

Still, by the end, a surprising amount of the old knowledge had started coming back. Routes were becoming familiar again, little tricks were resurfacing, and I could see how another run would be considerably quicker. Survival Instinct also reminded me why I played so much of it in the first place: the different routes, survivor choices and fuel management give it more replayability than its reputation sometimes suggests.

It just turns out that after a decade away, the real survival instinct is remembering where you left the petrol.

🎬 Watch the Episode

If you want to see the complete run, from the first machete swing through to the final evacuation, you can watch The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct – Longplay here.

You can also follow the game through the Survival Instinct playlist and find more gameplay over on Dr Ravenholm on YouTube. If you enjoy the video, leave a like, let me know what you remember about the game in the comments, and subscribe for more.

🔴 Join the Adventure Live

The finished video contains all 15 Deathloops, but being there live means you also get the conversations, questionable decisions and chat deciding exactly who should be blamed when another carefully considered plan goes wrong.

You can join us live on Twitch or YouTube. Huge thanks again to airstrike83rp and daftphoenix9024 for bringing their communities into the stream, and when the Walkers were finally dealt with we passed things on by raiding into Chrismu1.

🌐 Community & Links

The stream may end, but the conversation usually carries on somewhere else. If you want to keep up with what we’re playing, what we’re making or whatever subject chat wanders into next, you’ll find everything below.

Live — Come and see what happens before anybody knows how the night will end:
Twitch | YouTube

Community — Continue the conversation between streams:
Discord

Socials — Follow the latest clips, updates and general activity:
TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X

Music — If you want something to listen to once the Walkers finally stop making noise:
Spotify | Apple Music

Support — Help keep the streams, videos and other projects moving:
Fourthwall | Teespring | Streamlabs

More — Explore the other projects and work beyond the gaming channel:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog

💀 Fifteen Deathloops Later

So the supposedly familiar 40-minute run ended more than three hours later with the full game completed, 15 Deathloops recorded and enough dead batteries to make me seriously question the state of every vehicle in Georgia.

The Thursday experiment worked, though. We got a complete older game into a single stream, rediscovered why Survival Instinct had kept me playing years ago, and proved that remembering a speedrun and actually being able to perform it are very different things. Next up was Mass Effect: Andromeda, while the older-game Thursday slot still had plenty more possibilities waiting for us.

— Dr Ravenholm