Minecraft with Zombies

To all the zombie media fans here at HHS who might have wondered how well you’d fare during a zombie apocalypse, you can satisfy your curiosity, because a game being developed called Project Zomboid can finally answer your question.

Project Zomboid is a role playing game which puts you in the shoes of a custom created survivor living in Knox County, Kentucky, which has been quarantined by the outside world to contain the army of Romero style (slow and stupid, but plentiful) zombies inside. This is about all of the official story that the game has to offer at the moment, since it’s designed to be open ended. There aren’t any missions, levels, or quests for the player to go on; the only goal is to survive as long as possible. The only standard aspect of gameplay that every player will experience is the death of their player, hence the phrase on the loading screen, “this is how you die”

Part of the realism that the game is praised for is in all the ways for the player to lose. Take this scenario for instance: you can find yourself sneaking from house to house, searching for a weapon to use and food to eat, when suddenly a zombie comes out from around a wall corner and manages to get a scratch on you before you get away. With a 25% chance of succumbing to a zombie infection, several days later (depending on your character perks) the death screen appears, stating how many days you survived and zombies you dispatched, all the while following your now zombified character roaming the map. Other outcomes could have been that you were lucky to survive the scratch, but couldn’t find any disinfectants to clean your wound or suture needles to close it, and you die a few days later of a normal infection. If you can successfully dispatch or avoid the zombie from biting you, you could fall out of the window in your haste and die of a fracture. Even if you survived all of that, you might not be able to find any non-spoiled food and you end up starving to death in a few weeks or get poisoned by tainted food or water.

What prevents the game from being an epic fail simulator is all of the ways that you can avoid these previous deaths. You can choose the thick skinned trait to have less of a chance of getting scratched, you can choose the farmer trait to grow your own food, or you can choose the doctor profession to more effectively perform first aid on yourself. The ability to forage berries in the woods, boil tainted water, and build fortresses (if your carpentry level is high enough) allows for long term survival. There are too many scenarios and examples for me to even list. Project zomboid has the best of both worlds: Minecraft’s ability to craft and build things from the environment, and DayZ’s zombies and combat.

Project Zomboid is being developed by a multinational team of developers, The Indie Stone. It’s currently in Alpha stage (not yet a finished product), with free updates until it becomes a finished product. I’vebeen playing it ever since it was released in 2011, and this has been the best game I have ever played by far, and it will keep getting better with the addition of vehicles and complex non-playable characters. Currently it costs about $14.99 on Steam and has a free demo, but trust me, it’s worth its storage space in gold.