Something else you’ll come to learn about me is that I love zombies. Not like that, I mean, I guess if she was fresh and tied up and all, but I’m on a tangent. As a concept, as a threat, as a source of drama, I love zombies.

I have traced this to a gift I got as a kid. A friend of my grandma’s apparently thought that a book which detailed in exquisite, grotesque detail pretty much every flesh eating zombie movie to date would be an excellent gift for a seven year old child. I spent fifteen years terrified of zombies to the point where a movie would give me nightmares for a week.

I’m not as bad now, but I still have an amazing fascination with them. Something about them just appeals to me; how they are relentless, numberless, and tireless. The thing is, zombies have been done well in movies, they’ve been done well in books, but despite being a very common foe these days, they have very rarely been done well in games.

Partly this is because what we expect, or are presumed to expect, as gamers. Despite the “survival horror” moniker, survival is not all it is cracked up to be. Carry health items, conserve ammo, dodge zombies/ghosts/demons/whatever. Nothing about food, clean water, secure shelter, and so forth. Now some games go completely to the other end of the scale and make zombies fodder for hilarious slaughter, like Dead Rising. That’s quite fine with me, I love that sort of thing. I would prefer that ones at the survival, rather than action, end of the spectrum made a lot more effort to simulate survival proper.

More broadly the ‘survival’ genre is not exactly overflowing. There’s the Disaster Report series and… nothing else really comes to mind. Fort Zombie could have been something special but ended up being close to unplayable. Dead Island has the benefit of a lack of guns, but from what early reporting I hear, it is still conclusively action-oriented. I have no trouble with action, even as part of the survival end of the genre, but it should be short, dangerous, and shocking, I feel. Two of the current games I feel best do zombies are Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, and Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without A Pulse. The former of these because although many of the survival aspects are absent, and although the undead are fast (which is a huge faux pas in my elitist eyes), this game is one of the few to truly make the zombie apocalypse feel horrifying and dangerous. I don’t stand around fighting zombies in UD: I get done what I have to get done and then get the heck outta Dodge. When I see a dozen of the things come tearing over the crest of a hill at me, even though I’m on horseback with plentiful ammo and full Deadeye, I feel a shot of terror. It’s huge effective.

Stubbs the Zombie is a different kettle of fish altogether. You are a zombie, the eponymous Stubbs, and though your own abilities go rather beyond those of the typical undead (Using your head as a bowling ball and lobbing your liver as an explosive to name but two), the zombies you create are actually very faithful to what one thinks of as a zombie and, more than this, they act with uninfected AI characters very well. It is deeply fun and satisfying to infect a few people and watch them reanimate and spread amongst the populace.

Hopefully Dead State, though a tactical RPG, will be able to capture some many of the necessary elements. (To any who doubt how tense and downright terrifying turn-based games can be, go and dig up a copy of X-Com, fight a terror mission against Chrysalids, and you’ll reconsider your position.) From what they say they are giving due consideration to things like the need for supplies, the difficulty in trusting other survivors, and so forth. Even so I’m still holding out for a true zombie game in a GTA San Andreas style setting, which a heavy emphasis on survival, hiding, and cowering like a baby.