Basically each survival sport is about in the identical world – or at the least the identical ambiance. In DayZ, State of Decay, and Dying Gentle, it’s the precise apocalypse, when zombies have overtaken all of civilization. The Lengthy Darkish, The Forest, and Rust are extra sober and sensible, however the tone and the sense of place stay the identical. It’s all about desolation, this sense that the comforts of on a regular basis life have been annihilated, and also you’re making an attempt to eke out an existence in a spot that’s both fully lifeless or is solely antithetical to the fashionable world. It’s all gone. Or it was by no means right here to start with. That’s scary and tense in its personal manner, nevertheless it’s nothing in comparison with Mission Zomboid, one of the best survival sport I’ve ever performed.
Mission Zomboid doesn’t happen in a world that has collapsed, neither is it set in a wilderness the place you, because the participant, are an intruder. As an alternative, the Knox County of Mission Zomboid is within the strategy of collapsing. Monsters fill the streets. Your pals and neighbors are all lifeless, and the constructions and techniques of recent Western society have been summarily torn to items.
However, at the least within the early sport, the TV and radio stations are nonetheless broadcasting. Suburbia nonetheless appears like suburbia. The outlets and companies that line the streets of Muldraugh, Riverside, and so forth stay well-stocked, with the facility nonetheless on and automobiles parked exterior. Keep alive lengthy sufficient and you’ll, progressively, watch all of this begin to fold into itself. However the survival sport is essentially set on that precipice between normality and apocalypse.
And that’s what makes it scary. In a whole lot of Mission Zomboid’s rivals, the extent of the destruction or the totality of the barrenness turns into fantastical – these are worlds that move, at greatest, solely the faintest resemblance to our personal. Quite the opposite, all the things in Zomboid is recognizable, banal, ‘real.’ Primarily based on precise maps of Kentucky and Tennessee, The Indie Stone’s zombie sport turns into a horrific contortion of acquainted small cities – your city.
Within the true sense of the world – twisted, illogical, and grotesque, however nonetheless rooted in some type of tangible private expertise – the world of Mission Zomboid is nightmarish. I get up. I watch the tv. I eat breakfast. I go away the home to get some new instruments from the DIY retailer. And on my manner I move six of my neighbors, on their arms and knees, consuming flesh off the tarmac.
Narratively and conceptually, survival video games ought to put you underneath strain, and by no means help you really feel relaxed. The issue, nonetheless, is that regardless of how bleak or brutal their settings, they inevitably grow to be regular. In The Forest, as a participant, you by no means know or expertise something aside from the eponymous, cannibal-infested wildlands. In The Lengthy Darkish, from the beginning of the sport, you’re misplaced within the Canadian tundra, and so, regardless of its distinctive devastation, it at all times was and at all times is regular.
That opening sequence of The Final of Us, the place Joel is making an attempt to save lots of Sarah as his city falls into chaos, or that scene in The Strolling Useless when Shane and Lori are standing on the facet of the freeway watching the bombers drop napalm on Atlanta. The rationale these are so affecting is as a result of they join our personal precise dwelling world, as an viewers, to the terrifying alternate actuality of the respective video games and exhibits. This is the reason Mission Zomboid is so scary. There’s simply sufficient actuality there to contextualize and emphasize the atrociousness of the apocalypse.
