Generally speaking, I have had it with zombies. It doesn't matter what medium they're in, zombies are the most boring existential threat in popular culture, probably because we ran out of interesting things to say about them at least ten years ago. I don't know where the breaking point was—maybe it was the 819th time The Walking Dead suggested "maybe we are the real monsters"—but you'd be hard pressed to find a modern zombie story with anything truly interesting to say. Doubly so for video games, a medium in constant need to give players hordes of foes they can gun down and not feel morally compromised—hence their fondness for Nazis and zombies (although the former might have taken on an air of controversy for some strange reason.)
Given the excess of zombies in entertainment right now, I should probably hate State of Decay 2, a new zombie game for PC and Xbox One. Only I can't stop playing it. I'm about as confused as you are right now.
State of Decay 2 is a survival game that takes place well into the zombie apocalypse. At the start, you're responsible for a pair of characters—each with a random set of stats describing what they're good at (fighting, shooting, cooking) and a loose backstory ("Dave was a career extra who read a lot of Nietzsche")—who must soon set up a shelter and band together with other survivors to form a community with the end goal of taking out gross things called Plague Hearts that create more zombies.
But while you'll spend a lot of State of Decay 2 killing zombies, it's a game that's far more interested in other things. You've got to survive, and surviving means gathering food, medicine, ammo, and building supplies. You're doing what you can to keep your community healthy and in good enough spirits in a world that does not have a lot left to go around. It's a lot of tough calls and risky decisions, like taking your only survivor that's still in fighting shape into a zombie-infested farm because that's the only place you can find a trader that has medicine you desperately need.
Things are going to go wrong in State of Decay 2. Your survivors will get infected and you'll have to scramble for medicine; a car full of food is going to get stuck in a ditch; you're going to run out of gas. You will never have enough of what you need. You will foolishly take on a horde of zombies and discover you were not nearly as prepared as you thought you were. That's the draw of the game—there's no real story except the one you invent in your head as you try and keep your crew together. I'm not really the kind of guy to do that. I just want to carve out a space in the waste that is mine, to push back the horde enough to feel like I'm accomplishing something. On that level alone, State of Decay 2 does enough to keep me engaged, but you might want it to do more, and that would be completely fair. The game is also janky as hell—characters aren't gonna move smoothly all the time, the controls are a little weird, and everything in it is, on the whole, very clumsy. But that clumsiness also feels fundamental to the tension, and a reminder that you're never gonna be a zombie-killing specter of wrath. Instead, you're always some schmuck one bad call away from the end.
I'm a little uncomfortable by how easily I've slid into the rhythms of playing State of Decay 2, a game where you never have enough and you have to plow forward anyway. Ask me to explain that and I might tell you that it's because growing up, we were broke as shit, and living that way changes how you see the world, how you prioritize things, how financial fuckups make you want to scream in despair but you can only really allow yourself to feel that for a moment, because then you've gotta figure out how to move on anyway. I know how to function like this.
There's no real ending to State of Decay 2—the game gives you a number of short and long-term goals based on your current circumstances. Other survivors outside of your community will ask for help, your team's morale will rise or fall based on how shitty things are around them, and then there's the ever-dwindling number of supplies always in the corner of your eye. But there is an ostensible endgame: ultimately, if you get enough of your shit together, you want to take out all of those plague hearts, pick a leader from your crew, and build their reputation in the area, turning them into a folk hero of the zombie apocalypse. Getting recognition for just trying to get by.
That's something I know a lot less about.
