The Walking Dead Episode 4 arrives tomorrow

Come October 9, The Walking Dead Episode 4: Around Every Corner, will finally make its debut.

Great, unexpected news for those of you who are fans of Telltale Games’ episodic video game based on Robert Kirkman’s bleak comic book series The Walking Dead: The fourth episode, dubbed “Around Every Corner,” will see official release over the next two days. Specifically, the game will be available from the PlayStation Network Store as soon as Sony updates it on October 9, while the Xbox Live Arcade iteration of the Episode, as well as its PC and Mac analogues, will arrive on Wednesday, October 10. As with previous episodes, all versions, regardless of which service you purchase them through, will set you back $5.

Though any additional episodes of The Walking Dead are always welcome — you’ve seen our glowing, hyper-positive reviews of the episodes released so far, right? — Episode 4 is a particularly exciting arrival. Unlike past episodes, Around Every Corner has been written by Gary Whitta. If that name sounds familiar, it may be from his years as Editor In Chief of PC Gamer magazine, or from his work as a Hollywood screenwriter. Most notably, Whitta penned the script for the post-apocalyptic Denzel Washington-starring action flick The Book Of Eli.

As a bit of an aside, Whitta was also attached to write the ill-fated live-action English-language adaptation of classic anime epic Akira from 2008 to 2009, but we won’t hold that against him.

Those of you concerned that Whitta will come into the series and in an attempt to make it his own may somehow corrupt the so-far impressive adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s comics need not worry: Though Around Every Corner is Whitta’s first attempt at writing an episode himself, it should be noted that he has served as something of a supervisor for the writing in every Walking Dead episode to date. If that’s not enough for you, we should be publishing an interview with the man shortly in which we discuss the imminent Episode 4, as well as numerous other facets of The Walking Dead, so keep an eye out for that.

As for what we can expect to see from Episode 4, we’re momentarily as in the dark as you are. We expect the series’ gradual shift toward increasingly bleak, oppressive situations to continue, and we’d assume that people will die in this next episode, but given the number of corpses created by Episode 3, we’re growing increasingly concerned that Telltale is running out of ancillary characters to kill. More accurately, we worry that certain key beloved figures who we’ve grown very attached to over the past three episodes might meet a violent end in this latest installment. There’s more on that in the interview we mentioned, but for now let’s keep our collective fingers crossed that a certain little girl doesn’t get her brains chewed on by a shambling corpse.