Easily the best survival game I've played.
Easily the best zombie game I've played.

However, this zombie survival game doesn't play so easily.
It's rough, it's tough, it's punishing, but it's rewarding. There are plateaus, not skill curves.

Getting your first laceration from climbing through a broken window. Stomping a zombies head 10 times and wondering why it won't die because you're exhausted. Finding your first gun and realising at 0 skill it's really just a loud trumpet. Leaving something in the oven too long and causing a house fire. Accidentally pressing Q and getting your freshly done-up base surrounded. It's all part of the tried and true "learn from your mistakes" style of gameplay.

Before long, you start to get comfortable with the threat of the zombies, and begin to experiment. "Ah," you think, "I can continually lure them through this window or over a fence! And they always trip!" And you feel so smart after killing 4 zombies in a row this way, until the 5th and 6th one both do a lunge and teach you a lesson. In the next life, you add fire to the mix - constantly kiting the horde around a single flame, feeling once again so smug about your genius brain, until you find yourself surrounded by the flames.

Next time, you score yourself a car, and find out how devastating they are to the zoombinis. "Tally-ho!" you yell as you continually joust zombie hordes down the main streets, loud engine drawing more and more to the slaughter. You run down a few dozen more, maybe even learning of the "whirlwind" tactic as you drive around. But then the world goes quiet, and your car begins to silently coast, too slow to run down the horde that you were planning on. They come. They surround. They devour. "Damn". Another lesson in mortality. But you've learned. A car is a tool. Noise is a tool. Fire is a tool. And you are the Tool Man, with the world as your workshop. Blaze down the highways with your siren, lure the decaying ones to the purging flame, and cry as you accidentally run the car into a pole and break your neck, surrounded by the horde once again.

This is how you died.