Project Zomboid Impressions

Back in 2003, a friend and I had a dream. It was a dream of an open world, sandbox style zombie survival game. Many a long night was spent discussing in fine detail what it would consist of, and how it would play. A lot of these ideas were so ridiculous and far reaching that it’s unlikely a game like it would ever exist. With neither of us knowing the first thing about creating the game ourselves, it never went any further.

Skip forward to the present and IndieStone Studios have answered our prayers with Project Zomboid, an isometric zombie survival RPG. Currently the game is only in a pre-alpha tech demo state, but it is already impressive. The graphics have a nice 16 bit era style to them, and I love the foreboding music used to set the tone of the desperate struggle for survival.

The intro reminds you that this is the story of how you died. There is no end game, no final credits and no hope for survival. You will die eventually, it’s just a matter of how.

Your story begins in a house you have escaped to with your wife Kate. She is badly injured and her leg is broken. You need to patch her up and barricade the house from zombie attacks. This opening area acts as a tutorial for the game. Exploring the house you find a bed sheet, and using a Minecraft style crafting system the sheet can be ripped into strips, which can then be used to bandage Kate’s leg.

After barricading the doors and windows with some planks of wood, you can start to explore. Various symbols appear in the top right corner of screen to give you information of your state of mind and health. By this point in the game I was feeling hungry which decreased my strength and healing. Following the tutorial instructions, I left the safehouse and headed east to search the nearest house for food.

I found some tinned soup in the house along with a wandering zombie. Using the hammer I picked up when barricading the safehouse, I killed the zombie and headed back to prepare my food. There is no way to tell if the food was cooked at the moment, so after a couple of minutes I took the soup out of the oven.

I was then distracted by a radio broadcast revealing some details of the current situation with the zombie attacks. Once this was finished I went back downstairs to do some more exploring and was greeted with most of the kitchen in flames. Whoops, forgot to turn the oven off and now it has set the kitchen on fire! I raced upstairs to save Kate. I picked her up and carried her slowly downstairs, only to find that a horde of zombies had broken through my barricade. The sound of the smoke alarm must have attracted them. Kate and I then proceeded to be eaten by the horde.

That was my first playthrough of the demo. Since then I have survived for a bit longer, but not much. Maybe I just suck, but it seems like Project Zomboid is an extremely hard game at the moment. Each time I’ve played the demo a massive group of zombies have tracked me down and ripped me to pieces within half an hour. There are some weapons to find other than the hammer. The baseball bat was working fine until I got tired and could barely swing the thing.

I’m excited to see how the game will evolve over time. Some of the planned features sound interesting. Adding to the RPG element of the game, you will be able choose your job before the apocalypse and a number or traits. Some of these traits will give you advantage (being brave, resilient or strong), but they will need to be offset against negative traits (being clumsy, agoraphobic or overweight). As the game progresses survival will become harder with power failures and the army entering the city to perform ‘clean up operations’.

Project Zomboid is being updated and sold in a similar way to Minecraft. You can pay a one off fee and then receive all future updates for free. The paid version is currently down because of piracy problems, but you can download the free tech demo here.