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Essentially every survival game is set in the same world – or at least the same atmosphere. In DayZ, State of Decay, and Dying Light, it’s the actual apocalypse, when zombies have overtaken all of civilization. The Long Dark, The Forest, and Rust are more sober and realistic, but the tone and the sense of place remain the same. It’s all about desolation, this sense that the comforts of everyday life have been annihilated, and you’re trying to eke out an existence in a place that’s either completely dead or is entirely antithetical to the modern world. It’s all gone. Or it was never here to begin with. That’s scary and tense in its own way, but it’s nothing compared to Project Zomboid, the best survival game I’ve ever played.
Project Zomboid doesn’t take place in a world that has collapsed, nor is it set in a wilderness where you, as the player, are an interloper. Instead, the Knox County of Project Zomboid is in the process of collapsing. Monsters fill the streets. Your friends and neighbors are all dead, and the structures and systems of modern Western society have been summarily torn to pieces.
But, at least in the early game, the TV and radio stations are still broadcasting. Suburbia still looks like suburbia. The shops and businesses that line the streets of Muldraugh, Riverside, and so on remain well-stocked, with the power still on and cars parked outside. Stay alive long enough and you will, gradually, watch all of this start to fold into itself. But the survival game is largely set on that precipice between normality and apocalypse.
And that’s what makes it frightening. In a lot of Project Zomboid’s rivals, the extent of the destruction or the totality of the barrenness becomes fantastical – these are worlds that pass, at best, only the faintest resemblance to our own. On the contrary, everything in Zomboid is recognizable, banal, ‘real.’ Based on actual maps of Kentucky and Tennessee, The Indie Stone’s zombie game becomes a horrific contortion of familiar small towns – your town.
In the true sense of the world – twisted, illogical, and grotesque, but still rooted in some kind of tangible personal experience – the world of Project Zomboid is nightmarish. I wake up. I watch the television. I eat breakfast. I leave the house to get some new tools from the DIY store. And on my way I pass six of my neighbors, on their hands and knees, eating flesh off the tarmac.
Narratively and conceptually, survival games should put you under pressure, and never allow you to feel at ease. The problem, however, is that no matter how bleak or brutal their settings, they inevitably become normal. In The Forest, as a player, you never know or experience anything other than the eponymous, cannibal-infested wildlands. In The Long Dark, from the start of the game, you’re lost in the Canadian tundra, and so, despite its exceptional devastation, it always was and always is normal.
That opening sequence of The Last of Us, where Joel is trying to save Sarah as his town falls into chaos, or that scene in The Walking Dead when Shane and Lori are standing on the side of the highway watching the bombers drop napalm on Atlanta. The reason these are so affecting is because they connect our own actual living world, as an audience, to the terrifying alternate reality of the respective games and shows. This is why Project Zomboid is so frightening. There’s just enough reality there to contextualize and emphasize the atrociousness of the apocalypse.
