State Of Decay 2 Is The Ultimate Apocalypse Survival Simulation

HOME IMPROVEMENT AND EASY LIVING AT THE END OF THE WORLD

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It’s often the plight of the people – the exploration of life and death in our most desperate hours of need – that make for the best survival stories. Videogames have often struggled in leveraging the undead as a central antagonist in these fraught settings, with most failing to recognise that it’s the people, rather than the rotting sacks of meat, that should be at the heart of these experiences. That’s been true ever since the arrival of Dead Rising at the turn of the last generation; Capcom’s near-comedic obsession with volume and violence, on raw numbers and abject body horror, had a habit of getting in the way of nuanced storytelling – an element of its design that filtered out across all those that would follow in its footsteps.

If the idea has been to merely evoke a sense of distress from players by presenting them with seemingly impossible odds for survival – to excite by providing an inordinate array of opportunities to hack, slash and shoot their way to victory – then the likes of Dead Rising, Dead Island and Dying Light have certainly done a good enough job with the basics of zombie infused fiction. While these experiences are fun, it’s impossible to escape the pervading fear that games should be able to offer more when dealing with the subject matter. Perhaps that’s why Undead Labs’