Project Zomboid is at its core a game that tries to realistically emulate what it might be like if you were actually doomed to a zombie apocalypse. In fact, even when you create a new game it doesn’t screw around; it tells you straight up that this is the story of how you died, nailing shut any doubt that you’re going to get out of this unscathed.
Developed by independent developer The Indie Stone, Project Zomboid (which we’ll just call Zomboid from now on) is an isometric 2D survival game that challenges you to persist in a doomed world until you die. Eventually there will be more modes, but for now Sandbox seems to be the most robust of the options and my personal favorite.
Before you get in-game, you get to set tons of parameters. You can even mold the zombies to fit your own vision of what zombies truly are or should be. Do you want classic slow shambling zombies that are dim-witted and quickly forget, fast zombies with an uncanny sense of smell, blind zombies with an unreal sense of hearing, zombies that contract their disease through saliva, or go Walking Dead style; you’re all infected and need only be killed?
All these decisions are yours, as well as a healthy dose of other options such as deciding how much loot is left in the world for you to pilfer, when water and electricity shuts off, and perhaps my favorite option, how the time scale works. You can, if you want, make days pass in a matter of minutes or in real time.
After you set up the world and zombie rules, you can create your character and bestow them with good and bad traits. Bad traits add points that you can spend on good ones, so you can either leave your character as-is or make them have an equal number of strengths and weaknesses and play to them.
Since the game isn’t finished, there are no other NPC survivors in-game, though they’re planned. Wandering the world as the only person still alive gets pretty lonely, but also unexpectedly scary. Despite the isometric view, I admit that I’ve jumped a couple times, especially when going into a dark house at night and there’s a zombie right on the other side of the door.
To wrap up, I’ll just say that there’s a lot of robustness to the gameplay. You can carry nearly any item, open and close doors and windows, gather wood and either barricade houses or build your own structures from scratch (if you live long enough to complete such an endeavor), stock up on water before the utilities go down, and so on.
There are quite a few bugs as to be expected from early access and though previously The Indie Stone has been… strangely relaxed and sloppy about releasing updates (some of which took 6 months to release), the updates seem to finally be coming at a better clip, so now’s the best time to get in on Zomboid since it only costs $8.
You can buy it on Desura here. Or if you’d rather wait, we’ll try to keep you up to date on any major future improvements, and will definitely have a review up when/if the game is finished.
Project Zomboid is for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
