

You switch to controlling another survivor and that’s that.īecause Marcus and Ed didn’t know to prepare a zombie bug-out bag and identify a safe location in advance like the Guide suggests, when the Ranger Station they initially hide in is overrun by zombies, your first order of business is to find them a place to hole up. And death means something in this game-there are no manual saves in State of Decay, and when a survivor dies, they’re gone. The need for stealth will be obvious for anyone who’s read the Guide, but might be a hard lesson for everyone else. When you forage for supplies you can sift through the contents of bags and refrigerators and toolboxes and the like carefully and quietly, or speed up the search at the risk of making a lot of noise and attracting a crowd of the undead.

You will rarely be able to attack a single zombie without attracting every other zombie in the immediate vicinity. The immediate requirement for stealth is not. The minimap in the lower left-hand corner and the third person perspective are reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto. Cities will be death traps when the dead rise so when Marcus, the initial survivor you control, and his friend Ed return from a fishing trip and stumble into the end of the world, at least they’re precisely where the Guide would tell them to be. State of Decay takes place in Trumbull Valley, a rural community dotted with farms, orchards and towns straight out of The Andy Griffith Show. So it occurred to me that if Undead Labs really were the experts they claimed to be, their game ought to jive with a majority of what the Guide had to say. Brooks’s Guide is generally considered by the ranks of zombie fandom to be a manual that might actually function as advertised and keep you alive when the zombies inevitably walk the earth. Zombie fans should also be aware of The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks, which reads like a civil defense manual for zombie preparation. In their down time at the studio they discuss the most important question any zombie fan can ask another zombie fan, “What would you do if there actually was a zombie apocalypse?” State of Decay, their open world zombie game, allows its players to answer that question. The developers at Undead Labs are self-professed zombie aficionados.
