Let me begin this by saying that DayZ, is the scariest video game I’ve played in a very long time. The mod based on Arma II shoves you in the middle of a militarized landscape with pretty much nothing for survival. If you want to survive, you’ll have to investigate abandoned buildings, kill and steal from other players and generally explore and fight your little heart out.
But there’s a problem, and that problem is the fact that there are zombies freakin’ everywhere. Most of them have the hypersensitivity of a chihuahua, so moving within a five mile range of them causes them to chase you. Now that’s okay when they’re slow moving zombies, but not all DayZ zombies are made equal, so occasionally you’ll get something capable of sprinting after you.
To avoid detection, you can creep and crawl. Problem is, that slows you down to the point where any zombie that has you on its radar can catch up very quickly. Honestly, I spent most of the time I was playing DayZ running into the ocean whilst a conga line of determined undead people followed.
DayZ is such a scary game that this map here, which has nothing to do with DayZ, and is actually based on an entirely different game, Project Zomboid, reminds me enough of it to give me flashbacks and let me spend four paragraphs reminiscing in a mild state of terror.
Project Zomboid is a much more cartoony isometric experience, but a deeper game, because Project Zomboid takes things into account like state of mind. It’s not enough to have food and weapons to defend yourself from the undead, you also have to have a smile in your heart. That makes life pretty difficult when everything around you is rotting and yet still somehow able to kill you.
And then there’s this map, this minecraft version which takes a little part of all three games and turns your minecraft experience into a thirsty one. It also has a fairly nasty little mechanic whereby collecting enchantment levels makes you more visible to zombies. So forget about that Sharpness 10 sword you’ve been yearning for – just collecting the XP for it will bring every animated corpse to your door.
Check out these images of the Minecraft Project Zomboid map!