Where Does Back 4 Blood Take Place?

Back 4 Blood is the latest hit in the cooperative zombie horror survival genre. It has a story that is easy to follow and has characters that all have their quirks and dialogue with each other. However, there are a series of questions to be posed here. Where does the game take place? What’s the backstory? How did humanity get here? We’ll answer this here.

Where does Back 4 Blood take place?

According to Phil Robb, the co-founder and creative director at Turtle Rock Studios, this game takes place in a fictional city in Western Pennsylvania. This is unveiled when he spoke about the backstory of Jim, one of the playable Cleaners in Back 4 Blood.

“Jim is a homage to a lot of the folks in Western Pennsylvania,” he explains.

What backs this claim up even further is when you come across the fourth mission of Act One— The Crossing. In this level, you are tasked to hurry across the Washington Crossing Bridge. This is an actual place in current times, specifically in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It might not closely resemble the actual locale, given the blue background in a post-apocalyptic setting in-game.

To further show that this game takes place in Western Pennsylvania, the Turtle Rock Studios Twitter account posted a cheeky tweet about Evangelo helping the team celebrate the launch week of Back 4 Blood with some Philly cheesesteaks. Now that’s some good brand collaboration.

What’s the backstory of the game?

The backstory of Back 4 Blood starts off with the fall of humanity from this possible extraterrestrial virus. Dubbed the “Devil Worm”, this worm-like parasite essentially can come into contact with humans, turning them into the Ridden.

If you play as Holly or have her in your team, she’ll eventually open about how she lost her family to the Devil Worm. She carries the guilt that all she did was run instead of helping them out. From hearing Holly talk, you can hear her subtle accent, making the obvious assumption that she’s Canadian.

Since she’s from Canada and the Devil Worm is essentially the source that created this heavily infectious virus, you can deduce the virus originated from The Great White North. Looking further into the Devil Worm parasite, the first instance where it was spotted was at the Pingualuit Crater in Quebec, Canada.

It made its way across the border after a containment breach in a lab, sparing no human life it comes into contact with. The rest is history, leading up to why Fort Hope has deployed its eight best Cleaners to put an end to the Ridden threat once and for all.

Back 4 Blood is out now for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series S/X, and PC via Steam and Epic Games. You can check out additional content on the game like guides, news, and a review by clicking here.