Title: I couldn't even go back for his body
✅ Recommended
"Sam is dead."
A whole day has passed, and I still can't write a proper review. Because my mind is stuck on this one thing. Sam – the survivor I got killed myself in a zombie horde at three in the morning – his body is still lying behind the gas station in Trumbull Valley. And I can't even bring myself to go back.
This is State of Decay.
If you're expecting Dead Rising style crowd-slaughter, or Resident Evil levels of plot armor – swipe away, right now. This was never a "game about killing zombies". This is a game about still having to live after the zombies are done with you. And living here costs far more than you can imagine.
🌑 No heroes. Just a bunch of hungry, ordinary people.
The opening doesn't drop a super-soldier from the sky. You're just some ordinary person crawling out of a lakeside camping cabin, maybe with a wrench and half a bag of chips in your backpack. Your first priority isn't "saving humanity" – that's Hollywood. Your job is to find the next can of beans, scrape together three bottles of antibiotics for a feverish teammate, and get back to camp before dark in a pickup truck with one bar of gas left. This world is brutally fair: zombies aren't slow, weapons break, stamina runs out, and every time you swing that pipe, there's only one thought running through your head – please don't let there be another one behind me.
You don't control one person. You control an entire community. Today the clinic doctor comes back covered in wounds, and meds are running low. Tomorrow your sniper Ray goes dark while scavenging – just static on the radio. You switch to another car and drive across the map looking for him. Find him, feed him a morphine. Don't find him – his name greys out on the survivor list. No one calls you "boss" anymore.
💔 More terrifying than zombies: the voices fading from the radio
"Mayday, is anyone there? Someone in our base is infected – hello? Hello?"
I've gotten countless distress calls like that. At first I answered every one. Then one time I didn't – no resources, no gas, half my team already wounded. The next day, that signal never came back. I drove past the location later. Just an empty house, a pool of blood, an overturned walkie-talkie, and an ordinary zombie crouched over a body, tearing into it.
I hesitated for ten seconds. Then I drove around it and stepped on the gas.
The game didn't flash any prompt. No red "Mission Failed" text. No penalty to my reputation. It did nothing. It just said, wordlessly: this was your choice. Now live with it.
😭 Permadeath: every zombie you kill in this game is someone you failed to save
When a character dies, they're gone. Not a black screen and a reload. Not a respawn. The moment their portrait goes grey – your mouth, your hands, your gun, the "Reflexes" and "Blunt Weapons" skills you spent dozens of hours leveling – wiped out. Permanently. If it was one of your mains, the community morale tanks. The survivors start fighting, drinking, even leaving. And that character's backpack stays forever on the top floor of some abandoned apartment, holding the custom M4 and eight magazines you saved up for weeks.
Next time you drive past, their body is still there. The system never even despawns it.
I thought this was a zombie game where you have fun. I was wrong. This is a survival sim that leaves you staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, replaying that fight in your head, asking yourself why didn't I eat one more stamina snack?
🎲 Let's be honest: this game is far from perfect
The graphics look like they time-traveled here from 2013. The NPC AI is so dumb they'll spin in circles in an open field. Cars handle like wet bars of soap. Bugs are so common you could unlock a whole "zombie chic" clipping show for free. Gunplay feels like swinging a wet towel. The story is so loose it barely exists, and finishing the game just brings a strange sense of relief: finally, I won't be woken up at midnight by Lily screaming "A horde is heading for our camp!"
But you know what?
It's exactly that roughness, that clumsiness, that makes every survivor's breath in this rotting town feel more real than any CGI cutscene in a triple-A blockbuster.
"Evacuation successful. Let's go."
Through the car window, the sunset paints the tunnel entrance blood red. A final signal crackles over the radio: "Can anyone hear me... this is... is anyone still out there..."
I turned up the volume by one notch. No one answered.
Sam is still lying behind that gas station. I couldn't even go back for his body.
But no one on this wasteland will care. A new day begins. The coffee is just boiling on the stove. One last can of beans sits in the fridge. I grab my gun and push the door open. Outside, the zombies are closing in again.
See, that's State of Decay. It doesn't promise redemption. It doesn't guarantee a happy ending. It just slams a dented helmet into your chest and says:
Go. Get them through today.
Tomorrow? Worry about it tomorrow.
Final score: 8.5/10
PS: Never drive fast at night to scout. Never. And one more thing – hoard snacks. In a pinch, they're a thousand times more useful than a gun.
