Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Variety of Zombies!

I want to write about Skyrim and how wonderful its been. But things I can’t talk about have kept me from investing as much time in that amazing little sandbox as I’d like, so I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing so right now. So instead of writing another premature love letter to a big, sprawling game I’m about halfway through I’m going to write about the three very different zombie experiences I’ve been alternating between over the last month.

See, I’ve been working in my private life on a larger piece of zombie fiction and I’ve been thinking about how zombies work as a mirror for ourselves, how they serve as objects in stories and how they operate as potent symbols for various aspects of human nature as we utilize them. And since I’m a huge nerd and the other huge nerds who make up the community I orbit have been working on a lot of games with zombies in them I’ve had a lot to ponder in gaming of late. Let me begin with the example I haven’t mentioned previously on this blog, a little indie game from the maker of Flotilla called “Zombie Atom Smasher.”

Zombie Atom Smasher

Like all Blendo games, this one is cute, smart, punishing and tremendously rewarding in its play. It’s also centered around the concept of failure – it’s extremely hard to win a round of this game, even on normal difficulty. With modifiers in place you can make your experience more manageable, but as a default this isn’t a product about winning the game so much as it is about holding out as long as you can. See, the zombies will never stop coming. Ever. They’ll always be scratching at your door, always attempting to devour your tasty, tasty brains. And there are a lot of them, an insurmountable number. With your randomly assigned resources, many of which do little more than block off a street, there isn’t a lot you can do to win.

And so we see the zombie in Zombie Atom Smasher as part of an insurmountable tide, a force of social change which threatens to eradicate our very way of life. As we play out their game in the environments we cling to, the childish cityscapes of Neuvos Ares, we see this tide swell and overtake the institutions we feebly attempt to defend. There will always be more zombies – this is the lesson of Zombie Atom Smasher. And there will never be enough time or bullets to kill them all and save all the civilians.

You’re playing a game of numbers against the numbers, doing your best to save as many as you can, hold out as long as you can against the tide, long enough to use weapons of desperation to strike back against the force crashing against your gates and pulling down your walls. These are Romertian zombies – alone, not a threat at all, en masse, a force which threatens to overwhelm society.

Dead Island

You knew this one was coming, didn’t you? Dead Island’s zombies are kind of perfect action movie zombies, and a great way to consider zombies in a number of different lights. They symbolize a fearsome other, a force capable of transforming both human life and the human body so that we become not only shambling shells of what we once were, but also twisted weapons that are turned against those we held dear. They symbolize the feral nature of man, the middle finger response to colonialism that whitey has had coming for centuries. They symbolize, in various turns, the threats that we must face – slothful zombies in large numbers that make us run, quick zombies that force us to consider our movements, “special” zombies that make us solve the puzzle of just how to defeat them with the resources we have on hand.

But what’s most interesting about Dead Island’s zombies is that they’re always surmountable – there’s never an occasion aside from the introduction where you absolutely cannot beat the zombies bearing down on you. There’s always a weapon, always a way. Zombies in Dead Island are a piece of a puzzle, a hurdle to be overcome. Unlike the sweeping social change zombies of Zombie Atom Smasher and Romero fame they don’t represent a threat that cannot be weathered, cannot be stopped. Instead they represent a challenge to be overcome, a challenge which either forces people together or destroys them.

They’ve got less in common with classic zombies than they do with the Danny Boyle zombies of 28 Days Later. Even one can be a potent threat, and against a horde running is almost always the best choice, but they’re dying out in droves. When we set up defenses they’re never crashing through the gates, when the threat invades our makeshift homes it does so from within, through the infected loved one, through the vanity of our institutions, our blind faith in them. The zombies of Dead Island want to upset society, but they’re not going to overwhelm us – a solid piece of wood and a good supply of canned food will keep them as bay as long as need be. But if you wander out into the world at large, if you embark on an adventure and try to make the world any better, you’ll be undone.

Space Pirates and Zombies

And finally we come to Space Pirates and Zombies, where there are relatively few zombies all things considered. And the zombies in SPAZ are kind of weird in terms of how they function, because they’re not destroying society. The institutions that make up society are destroying it. The zombies are sort of just there, in the middle of the mix, fucking shit up and making it a little more interesting.

That is, until we enter the final act of the game. Then all bets are suddenly off – the laughable zombies we occasionally fight, the ones that make us accidentally shoot our allies while spraying to knock off zombie drones, become our primary entity, representative of a primal, universal force attempting to undo man. The most relevant parallel I can think of is that of HP Lovecraft – the zombies aren’t necessarily going to beat us back into the Stone Age, but they are certainly hell-bent on beating us down as a species and reminding us that to many in the universe we are no more than food, zombie fuel for their twisted warships.

Of course, the downside of that is that they sort of lack punch by merit of the space setting – we have spaceships, we’re invested enough in the universe that we can take on the zombies and their runty children. I’m sure there will be a challenging boss fight late in the game, a game so long I’ve barely even begun to approach its ending, but right now the zombies are just a bunch of chaff that I rip through with my auto cannons firing, smearing them into red splotches in space.

These games don’t have a lot in common – they’re all different gameplay models, all different themes and artistic styles and mechanics combining to show the diversity of zombies as a device in gaming and indeed in storytelling. So next time you hear someone mention zombies, don’t roll your eyes and call them played out. Ask them what kind, and you might just get an interesting answer.