These are closer to being a series of notes and observations. With the ulterior motive of me observing what does and doesn't work. So I can shamelessly appropriate/avoid these things as I write my own zombie IF.
Props to someone who wrote their own engine from scratch, and did a reasonably good job of it from a technical perspective. But there's just not that much game here: around eight locations, depending on how you count, plus one zombie and a horde in the background in one place that it's not possible to interact with in any way. The PC is barely characterized at all, and there are no NPCs aside from the single zombie.
Too, the engine has the weird effect of making a piece of CYOA IF try to look like parser IF, but doing a bad job of it: the options are written in a parser-like way, as if you were typing them, but they're well-written commands
neither from the standpoint of traditional grammar nor from the standpoint of what a player would be likely to type in a piece of parser IF.
The game mentions directions, but there's no real use for them, since there's no parser: actions are chosen from an option menu for each turn. For this very reason, using directions breaks the mimetic effect: the fact that there's no in-play reason to know that the window is on the north wall highlights the fact that there's no in-character reason for the character to constantly notice directions, either. Nor is the game consistent in this: not all moves have directions noted.
The here are your options
list, even more so than in most CYOA, causes the parser-freedom illusion to evaporate completely. Perhaps it's because there are so few options at any given point.
There's a save
option most of the time, and saving claims to be successful, but it doesn't seem to actually, yanno, create a file.
There's plenty to like here. Let's start with that.
First: it's a large-map treasure hunt, which is neither good nor bad on its own; but this does a number of things very well for the type of game it is. All of the puzzles are solveable, and none of them is basically unfair (though what you have to do with the wax statue involves a fair amount of guessing multiple possible ways of interacting with an NPC; there's perhaps a bit of logic where zombies are connected to voodoo and you're expected to figure out that connection. That's how I got to the solution, anyway). The map is unfolded gradually, and there are always multiple puzzles to work on at any point. Some of the humor is quite funny (though there are plenty of other places where the author apparently thinks he's much funnier than he actually is). The surreal tone is maintained quite well throughout the game, and PC characterization is done fairly well through voice. Some of the puzzles are rather clever, and all in all, the weird melange of elements coheres into a fairly stable style full of heterogeneous absurdities, probably as successful in that one regard as the first Zork—no small achievement on its own.
On the other hand, being full of sophomoric humor is a real downside. Oh boy, jokes about farting hippies. And farting in general. Plenty of fart jokes all around here. The writing is atrocious in places and is often careless even when it's not terrible: there are basic punctuation problems everywhere, which constantly yanks me out of whatever immersion the game has managed to achieve. The implementation is very very thin—nearly half of the rooms are merely setting, IIRC, with minimal possibilities for meaningful interaction—and the NPCs are hardly there at all. There are plenty of annoying bugs (you can wear something, but that doesn't mean it's in your inventory or that it will come with you when you leave the room—to take just one example). The hunger and sleep daemons are annoying, as they are in every game since well before 2002. And the ending is anticlimactic: the lack of polished good writing really stands out there.
Hardly any zombies at all. Kind of disappointing.
Writing is atrocious, with the same clomping sentence structure in virtually every sentence, and the same abstract nouns used over and over. The unmotivated Capitalization of Words Deemed Significant, as if an initial capital were a substitute for italics, is Super Annoying. Each NPC has their characteristic verb that is used instead of to speak
; the characters are not even flat, but mere gestures toward postapocalyptic stereotypes. The choices for actions are often poorly considered and do a poor job of characterizing the PC.
There's not even one game here, let alone two. Very much a Look! I can Twine!
kind of exercise.
Well, it's a three-hour-comp entry, so there's just not that much here. In particular, there are five locations, and movement usually happens automatically, in response to plot events. A minimum number of items are implemented, and there's very little mystery about how to advance aside from having to guess the exact phrasing required by the parser.
There zombies are events, not creatures one can plausibly interact with. The NPC is barely there at all.
The writing is atrocious, with basic grammar errors throughout. Character behavior and motivation are pure genre stereotypes, without even the thin veneer of plausibility that those stereotypes are designed to operate with.
It took me longer to get SCARE installed and transcripting than it did to finish the game once I'd started it.