I went in with an open mind to this game before I had read any reviews, and unfortunately, the negative reviews are right. Of all the things that have already been called out in other reviews I haven't seen said enough, however, is just how meanderingly dull the entire experience is. I love permadeath, and games of this ilk are some of my favorites, but where predecessors like the Rebuild series struck a wonderful balance in city exploration and progression, this game unfortunately fails in that pacing. There are unique events that will occur after a specific amount of time has passed in game, and your survivors can kill each other if they're not getting along great, but after a decently sized session, you've seen it all. This is a punishing game, but rarely does that punishment ever like a reaction to a consequence of a lack of foresight, and more to completely random chance: A room with 2-3 zombies can be a walk in the park, or can wipe out your entire fully armored crew if the invisible dice roll against you. And that...is more or less it. This is as unfortunately barebones as it could come, and still riddled with odd bugs and baffling design decisions that are hard to appreciate.
This isn't helped by the fact that even with a limit of 5 survivors in normal--the mode i primarily played-- you're going to very quickly lose track of who is who, as they are all represented in game by stones and buttons on a map. While great in the minimalist concept, the endless randomization means that every session those same rocks and stones are assigned to different characters, and given how there are only about 6 or 7 character portraits, you're going to mix up who people are and what they do far too often. This doesn't help the already mind-numbing repetition found in navigating the menus, slowly transporting goods from house to house, slowly but surely fortifying and exploring each location, having to manually reequip gear every single time you send your kids out--draining is the word that comes to mind. I cannot emphasize the inventory issue enough; no matter what your settings or difficulty, you will need to micromanage pretty much every facet and spend a good chunk of the experience moving your guff between houses over and over again, especially gear. For some unholy reason, even though you control every other aspect, you cannot put the weapons and gear you want on the people you want to have it, and as you go deeper into the game you must manually equip everything from armor to weapons to inventory space increases EVERY SINGLE TIME. Most of the "hardcore" elements of this game are really there to simply waste your time, to pad things out, to convince you there is more going on than the most rudimentary elements, and it shows. While the game practically requires you to always be moving, this design often has me often compelled to turtle up between a few buildings simply because the mindnumbing process of moving your items as you go along at the cost of exploration is insane, and a genuinely terrible design decision. On paper, I get it; You can't take everything, and it becomes a constant game of value judgements. In practice, 60-70% of the game is in inventory menus. This is made all the more frustrating when I have played flashgames of similar design far predating Zafehouse that do everything it does better, and in flying colors.
If you would like an experience that delivers on survivor struggles, wordy text and risk/reward scavenging that doesn't make you feel like the undead themselves to play, check out Rebuild 2. It's an ancient flash game that is completely free, that also has an android version you can buy for a pittance. While a somewhat different breed, it is a game made by a single person that has far more heart, design, and care put into it that always manages to surprise me over a decade later. Zafehouse Diaries has a lot of potential and I would be curious to see if the sequel fixes these fundamental issues, but as it stands this is a promising and unique concept that fails in nearly every regard. Do not buy.
