October Magazine

eye that a complete stranger is just
picking up where the last person left
off. The neatest detail of this concept
is that backtracking to where
you died will reveal your previous
self shambling about as a newborn
zombie. Cave that past loser’s skull
in and you can retrieve everything
they were carrying. It both emphasises
your mortality and gives you
no real punishment for dying, save
for a bit of backtracking and the loss
of any accumulated gun skills – an
odd choice for survival horror.
The other novel feature of Zombi
was the gamepad, done away with
now we’re off the Wii U. Some of the
game’s tensest moments came in
the use of this second screen. With
your eyes averted, fumbling with a
locked door or searching through
your pack, the paranoia of a zombie
leaping out at any moment rode
high. Without the gamepad, Zombi
is just another action game that
doesn’t pause when you bring up
the menu.
(Oh, and for the graphics crowd:
yes, it does look a bit better. Not
much. Graphic upgrades are so incremental
these days that it hardly
merits mentioning.)
All in all, the saddest part of Zombi
is that since 2012, a lot of games
have just…done it better. State of
Decay made scrounging for supplies
more rewarding, Dead Rising
made battling the horde more fun,
Dying Light gave you much more
scope to explore. Compared to its
peers, the experience is still good,
but good is as far as it goes. Taken
as a whole, Zombi is as slow and
clumsy as the dead it depicts.