App of the Week (January 15, 2012): ZDay Survival Simulator

Posted by Hetal

For the past year, my Sunday nights have revolved around The Walking Dead, a television series chronicling the lives of a survivor group in a post-apocalyptic world of zombies. At the moment, the show is on a mid-season hiatus, and won’t be back until next month.

Luckily, until then, there’s the ZDay Survival Simulator — our latest App of the Week!

ZDay is a menu-based ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ type of decision-driven game — but it’s a lot more suspenseful than such a description might suggest! Similarly to the aforementioned TV show, ZDay casts you in the midst of a zombie apocalypse and tasked with making the best decisions for survival. Along the way, you encounter undead “walkers” and other survivors with whom you can band together and get out of your zombie-run town alive. (See? I told you it was suspenseful!)

Mechanics-wise, they game is almost like an interactive eComic in its stylization (The Walking Dead was originally a comic book too!), which even leaves the door open to sequels that are sure to keep players hooked and coming back for more. Hmmm… Do I smell a franchise?

Sure, there are a few clunky nuts and bolts along the way and needy areas for improvement (maybe a future update with Be Confident-style ambient soundtrack or sound FX for specific scenes?), but ZDay is an excellent example of an extremely well-written storyline making an otherwise simple-design game come alive. Sometimes, the pre-production creativity and attention to crafting an immersive in-game environment makes even more of a difference than dazzling animations and fancy codework.

Go get ZDay in the App Store now — and try not to play it alone at night!