It's one thing to make a survival game where you do everything you can to outlast a terrible situation while hoping to escape it entirely. But what developers Vanimals has done with their game Undying is something else entirely. As it is currently in Steam early access, with help from publisher Skystone Games, there is still more to come for this game, but what is already available has left quite an initial impression to say the least.
Gameplay
Playing as a mother who has been bitten by a zombie during the cities evacuation, your focus and goal of the game is to teach your son enough skills so that he will be able to survive once you succumb to the infection. With a heavy plot right from the start, this game brings the survival game to a different experience. Everything you do, from crafting, repairing, fighting, searching, collecting, and more, is all a learning moment for your son.
Starting out the game, you will find your house to be full of broken equipment. After clearing your backyard of the one enemy, you will need to head out to the neighborhood for your first attempt to search for goods. Here you will first be able to experience a way to train your son as you can have him search through scrap piles and collect items. However, any fighting that needs to be done will be on you. The goal is to collect enough material to fix up the mandatory sections of your house: the kitchen, the medicine table, and the crafting table.
Soon after you will be able to start exploring further into the world, such as the city and marketplace, but to do so you will need to follow the simple quest lines laid out. There isn't much expected of the player, as it is up to you on what you want to do, but following the quest line might be your best chance to escape the overrun city.
After you make some progress, you'll learn that there is a secondary evacuation planned, but you will need your broken down car to be fixed up in order to reach it. Fixing the car becomes your main objective, but you still need to focus on surviving and training your son along the way. As you collect materials, you will need to fully explore each zone you can reach, which expands once you get the car fixed up enough to work.
Don't forget that while you are doing things that your son doesn't have the experience to do yet, you will need to tell him to watch you complete the task. Every item you craft or recycle, every pile your search through, every meal you make, have him watch. If he can do the task, let him because he gets more experience that way. Once you have enough experience, go into the skill tree and start selecting different aspects for him to learn so that he can start doing more and more on his own.
The combat in the game is mostly straightforward. You will have an item, such as a bat or crowbar, and this will be your melee weapon. If you hold down the strike button, you will charge up your attack and by reaching full charge you will do the most damage and knock back enemies. Doing small attacks do small damage to the enemies, but take away the same amount of hit charges the weapon has. Typically a weapon will have 20 to 40 charges, which means that it can land that many hits, regardless of power level. Be careful using them up though as some weapons, such as the crowbar, can be used to open up certain search items with goods inside.
Expectations
This game really puts a different spin on the survival aspect of a survival game, which at first seemed like a small detail but really it revamps the experience altogether. I like that there are small side missions that can be done as well, but they are very hard to accomplish with the current set up to the game. I'm not sure if there is a randomization to what goods are placed around for you to find, but if so then that could make an overlap in materials in the long run. If not, then item management will really need to be a focal point of any gameplay.
The different enemies you come across have a gradual appearance and keeps the game interesting. Even though it doesn't feel like the type of game that would have one, I am hoping to see one or two bosses in the game, or perhaps a mini-boss type enemy that shows up every now and again.
Surviving to day 20 brought a really interesting surprise to the game that I don't want to spoil. But seeing that take place makes me really curious how the rest of the days are going to play out and what it means for our mother protagonist. There is a hint that she might be able to be saved before turning, but it really seems like this game is set up to have multiple endings, all of which are based on how well or poorly the player does.
Verdict
Undying is a survival game that has me hooked from the start! It isn't often that I a single-player, early access experience can bring hours of entertainment without me even noticing, but before I knew it, I was over five hours into this game. I can only imagine how much I'll enjoy the finished version of this game and I can't wait to experience it. Definitely, a game on the right track to be unique despite being in an over-saturated game genre.
