‘Zombie Night Terror’ Gameplay Makes You The Architect Of The Apocalypse, Coming To Steam Soon

The zombies George Romero introduced in Night of the Living Dead are implacable, embodying mindless conformity and the inevitability of death. All that’s human has been stripped from them. You can no more bargain with a zombie than you could a hurricane.

Before Romero zombie movies were very different. Films like White Zombie, I Walked With A Zombie, The Plague of Zombies and even Plan 9 From Outer Space were not about shambling, unreasoning hordes. Instead their plots inevitably came down to a hidden puppetmaster, usually a nefarious necromancer using voodoo to control the dead for his own ends. Zombie Night Terror is a new game (coming to Steam this spring) whose very mechanics inject the original zombie storytelling template into the new zombie apocalypse that has defined undead ghouls for the past 50 years.

The gameplay of Zombie Night Terror is easy to grasp. Vernon Vrolijk, marketing manager for developer Grambitious Digital Entertainment describes it as “Lemmings meets Night of the Living Dead.”

Your zombies march forward, gnawing club kids, bikers, and frat bros and adding to your horde. While you can’t steer any of your zombies directly, you can transmogrify them into different classses—Crawlers that can get up walls, charging Tanks, and Overlords that steer your zombies or command them to run and jump.

“The main goal is to try and infect as many people as you can,” Vrolijk said just before my horde was reduced to a sad twosome by a frenzied business executive with a pistol. Though I was getting wrecked, the mechanics of Zombie Night Terror, which includes injecting innocents with infected, zombifying DNA, put in mind the twisted agency behind those old zombie movie outbreaks.

Though, yeah, Zombie Night Terror is basically Lemmings with a bleak color palette and gorgeous, pixelated sprays of blood, the combination creates horror scenarios unlike any other in zombie games. In Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising or Dying Light you’re living out a single person’s zombie apocalypse drama, but in Zombie Night Terror every moment feels like a horror movie in miniature, as victim after victim sees their own survival drama come to a close. Your horde busts down a door and tears through survivors who had barricaded themselves in the room, another long Night of the Living Dead night has ended in despair and death.

The spirit of Zombie Night Terror is one hundred percent modern zombie. The disease behind the outbreak is the Romero virus and the first trailer recreates a scene from The Return of the Living Dead. Yet by making the player the monster behind the monsters (“Be the Zombie Apocalypse” is the game’s tagline), Zombie Night Terror recaptures some of the most forgotten stories in zombie movie history, returning you to a time when zombies were proxies for a diabolical mastermind. This time, it’s you.