3) State of Decay

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The go-anywhere, do-anything zombie apocalypse survival simulator might have just hit Xbox Live Arcade relatively recently, but it made enough of a splash to immediately warrant a sequel. Sure, the game is loads of fun, and there’s no shortage of things to do, but when it comes to the story it’s surprisingly linear for an open-world adventure. At some point during the campaign, the focus shifts from surviving the night, to surviving long-term and escaping the hell-on-earth valley of the dead. Any morsel of narrative progression meant you were getting closer to the end of the line, another step down The Green Mile for the life you’ve built with your survivors.

You can’t really knock State of Decay for that; after all, the goal is to survive and catching the last bus out of town is the logical move. We’ve got to tread carefully as we’re entering spoiler country, but suffice it to say, once your survival is secured, that’s about it. For those that aren’t ready to give it all up just yet, there isn’t much in the way of an infrastructure for choosing to scratch out an existence in your current digs. Outside of a few repeatable, randomly generated missions, there are no real meaningful contributions you can make without moving forward to the inevitable conclusion.

Now here’s the good news: the sequel is in the works. State of Decay was always meant to be a proof of concept, so to speak. Undead Labs wanted to make sure it nailed down the single player element before branching into the multiplayer stuff. Codenamed Class 4, the sequel will be a massively multiplayer version, likely larger in scope and scale and hopefully more accepting of the masochist who wants to continue to live in a zombie-infested world, and feel like they’re still making progress in some way. Essentially we want our zombie cake, and we want to eat it too. If that means we’re inevitably going to be eaten ourselves in that moment of exhausted, delirious weakness, so be it. Better to burn out than fade away.