Survival Horror Video Game
"an open-world game that is a unique combination of first-person shooter, survival horror, tower defense, and role-playing games"
— Steam
Think Minecraft meets Resident Evil or Last of Us. Think an open-world game of World War Z. Collect and mine materials to cope with the various enemies and environments in a post-apocalyptic world. Think ahead as you gather food and drink, build weapons, vehicles, and bases. Think on your feet as you face regular zombie hordes intent on murdering you. Then, almost certainly die anyway. Probably in less than seven days.
The game was developed (and is still in alpha at the time of writing) by a group known as The Fun Pimps. It's available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS, and there are old versions available for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It's been available on Steam since 2014 and is in a state of continual evolution (read: appropriately organised chaos). Despite it's alpha development status, it has sold many millions of copies and attracted a lot of positive attention. Reviews have been mixed, especially in the early days, but most of them were about technical rather than gameplay design issues.
A little undead gameplay
It is (reviewer cliche incoming) an unforgiving world; you begin with your bare hands and collect rocks, vegetation and wood. With these meagre supplies you begin to craft weapons and tools that you'll use to begin your survival. Yes, just like Minecraft you start by punching trees. The difference is that at any moment you could get et by wolves, zombie vultures or the mutated remnants of human civilisation. The world has several biomes, each with its own additional perils and challenges. In the desert biome for example, you need to watch your hydration and always make sure you have plenty of water; in the cities you need to watch out for more zombies.
Just as in Minecraft, you get to break things apart and build new things. The various buildings and mechanisms can be dismantled for components and materials, which you can use to construct new things. There are trader NPCs to, um, trade with or get quests from. I question the Steam review's use of "role-playing" to define it. There's no chance to truly role-play as NPC interactions are limited to "sell, buy, do this".
The zombies are pretty awesome, not just the shambling cretins from George Romero's film Night of the Living Dead. Some crawl, some stumble, some run, some have odd powers like self-destructive exploding. If zombies cannot find a direct route to you, they'll attempt to destroy your shelter. And because there is "real physics" in this world, they can destroy whole buildings by undermining foundation pillars. This is not Minecraft and these are not Minecraft zombies. As you progress through difficulty levels you'll see those that spit poisons, call reinforcements, leap through the air, and even explode to take you or your structures out. The day-to-day survival aspect is just one element of the game, though. Every seven game-days (or more depending on the difficulty settings chosen) there's a Blood Moon event, in which an unspeakable river of zombies spawns with the specific desire and goal of dismembering you. To do this they will stop at nothing, dismantling your defences and clambering over you to find and exploit any tiny chink you may have left open in your fortress.
There are many ways to play. There's a map set in the fictional county of Navezgane, Arizona, a "rare Eden in a world of devastation", with defined locations, and there's an open-world option which is randomly generated. The set map is a limited size with a variety of places to explore, including a number of cities and well-designed buildings (some of which are dungeon-style settings). The level of detail is good, and the structures are well thought out. There's loot to loot, traps to avoid and monsters to kill. Open worlds are (duh!) less predictable, larger and yet just as full. It's even possible to enjoy collaborative play; whilst there are no official game servers, it is possible to set up player servers that you can share with others to enable PvE and PvP options, and a wide variety of mods are available.
It is plenty scary, too. If you want to spend an hour or two avoiding ravening hordes intent on tearing you limb from limb there's no longer any need to wait for Black Friday because it's available in some abandonded mall in Navezgane for the low, low price of $25.
Written for Everything Is Going to Be Fine: The 2022 Halloween Horrorquest, of course. Also it seems to be my 600th writeup.
https://7daystodie.com/
Various YouTube playthroughs worth a watch
$ xclip -o | wc -w
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