Survival games are all good and fun, but I can only enjoy them if they present a decent challenge. RimWorld is a brilliant colony sim, for example, pitting players against ever-increasing odds until they escape the planet they crash-landed on or a raid of mechs obliterates them. Mount and Blade: Bannerlord keeps players on their toes with random events that can throw their carefully managed kingdom into disarray. But there’s no more brutal, story-driven simulation game than Zomboid Project.
Zomboid Project launched since 2011 and has effectively been in development for a decade at this point. The game has recently exploded in popularity, mainly due to an update that added a stable multiplayer mode. Are there still bugs and latency issues to fix? Absoutely. Corn Zomboid Project is now playable with a decent sized group of friends, all of whom you’ll see die or have to kill each other.
I know that last sentence sounds gloomy, but it’s the reality of Zomboid Project. This is not a game where you will build something the first time you play and survive the apocalypse with it. The game opens by saying “there is no hope” and “this is how you died”. Let me tell you right now, this is no joke.
If you play Zomboid Project, your character will die. It happens eventually, but unlike other survival crafting sims, death in Zomboid Project it’s expensive. All progress made with this character, especially in skill learning, vanishes upon death, as players must then create an entirely new character. Zomboid Project is a game where death is final and happens quite often.
But everything that led to this death is spectacular. In its instant gameplay, Zomboid Project is a rambling story of survival. There is no room to thrive in the game, only to escape otherwise deadly situations by the skin of your teeth. And telling the story of this character’s life after he’s probably resurrected as a member of the undead is one of the Zomboid Projectthe greatest joys, right next to finding that zombified corpse and smashing its head in to claim all your old loot.
Few highs, many lows
While Zomboid Project would you believe there are two major players – yourself and the zombies – that’s not really the case. Comedy and tragedy dominate the game, and players will regularly find themselves in both.
During one of my recent sessions with friends, a friend of mine and I decided to venture out of our hideaway to find another friend of ours. We eventually found him and celebrated for a second over a soda before realizing he was leading a trail of several zombies after us. At this point we didn’t have very good gear and the friend we just found got bitten.
Basic injuries in Zomboid Project come in three flavors: scratches, lacerations and bites. If a zombie claws at you, there’s a 7% chance you’ll roll over. A laceration is more dangerous, increasing this chance by up to 25%. But if you’re bitten, it’s a death sentence. You have a few hours to a few days until you join the undead.
We all had a good laugh knowing that our bitten friend was dead and there was nothing we could do about it but one thing. “Well Steve, I’ve got this bleach here if you want one last drink before you turn around,” I said, before I was told to shut it up. My friend instead decided to go out in a blaze of glory, setting up a haven to respawn nearby before running east and setting off a car alarm, driving the hordes of undead away from our haven.
learn from death
Playing with friends can make these stories a little funnier than they usually would be. Playing alone, I died of the simplest of things. I once climbed out of a window and suffered a deep cut, which ultimately led to my character bleeding out. It was not a graceful death, but one I learned from.
And that’s the value of the stories told in Zomboid Project. Each story experienced by the players comes with a moral. The death of each character is a learning experience. With their brutality and all the struggle that comes with in-game death, the stories experienced by players in Zomboid Project don’t look like anything else. They show that something small like a cut or scrape can become huge and leave an impression on players that won’t go away quickly.
Compared to other simulation games, or even other zombie titles, Zomboid ProjectThe use of death as the ending of every story is virtually unheard of. Few zombie titles actually show players at a disadvantage – Back 4 Blood and left for deadSurvivors turn the undead into ground meat and Risin deadg protagonists can fend off zeds with a myriad of goofy weapons – but for Zomboid Project, that power dynamic is built in. If players could fend off hordes of undead, they wouldn’t die, and without death they wouldn’t get the full gaming experience.
Zomboid Project is like those boss fights where players are supposed to lose and then immediately jump back into the game. Progressing and learning the game requires death, players have to kill a character and learn from their mistakes. Zomboid ProjectThe gameplay of is one in a million, because without any outside influence, there’s only one way for players to learn, and that’s from the stories they remember.
