Zafehouse: Diaries

Full disclosure: played only on "normal" mode, the one where you need to fix the car and get the hell out of Dodge. I've never ever managed to complete the mission. I did however have a lot of fun while not completing it! Everything plays very tactical: find the best starting location, clean it up, barricade inside and set up traps, gather useful items from surrounding places etc. On of that there's the interaction between people in your party to take care of - let those get too bad and someone might end up with a broken leg... Fun, right? There's one thing that I noticed recently though: random events generator isn't always too fond of its own decisions. For instance: one of my characters gets left behind on the way to hospital, cause she had a broken leg. Two paragraphs down she's the one who lets the other 3 people into the hospital, even though they went ahead of her. Or that one time, where a character just died, then the diary went on to describe what she did and how. Still, the game is incredibly hard and gives you enough control to make you feel like on this next round, you'll definitely make a breakthrough. Fairly addictive and replayable (due to randomized everything). This game was an impulse buy, but I'm happy I bought it. Recommended!

The concept it great, but the execution badly flawed. Some characters can only carry a pound and a half and I don't think I spotted anyone who could carry more than 8. This combined with the hour long turns means that carrying two snacks from a house you are exploring to the one you are fortifying takes two hours.

If you're looking form something new and fresh, Zafehouse Diaries is for you. This is not your typical zombie apocalypse survival horror game. This plays more like a text adventure/management game. You will not be shooting any zombies in this, other then the text that describes what happened over the past hour. If you don't mind a lot of reading, (which is pretty much all you do in the game) or having to start all over, because trust me, this game is hard and not for the casual gamer. It takes a while to find a good strategy, and even then you can throw it all out the window because the game is randomly generated every time. Sometimes you might start with a large amount of weapons, but no food, other times you might start with no weapons, but a bunch of medical supplies. You might start with a good group that can search well, but have horrible combat skills, or you will get a group that's great at combat, but they argue all the time. Every person in the game has their flaws and strengths, and it will be up to you to hold the group together long enough to survive the end of the week. Which may not seem like a ling time, but the game plays hour for hour, so every time you click end turn only one hour goes by, so a week can last for quite a long time. I highly recommend this game to any fan of zombie horror survival, and to anyone looking for something a little different from all the other games out there.

A text-based game with occasional typos ("he are devastated"), foolish group dynamics, irritating encounters, a lame ending, and poor game-save options. I was also disappointed that the ending is nothing but a few, dismissive lines of text. Main problems: 1. You get your group to like each other by spreading a rumor from a list of five, dull options. Team members work better/worse together depending on their relationship statuses. Your success hinges on that. It puts the user into the role of a childish gossip who can talk once per game-day, and it makes that a major thing. 2. Random encounters stink. They often go like this: #1 total party kill, #2 sacrifice a single party member, or #3 get screwed over but live. There's little cleverness or strategy involved when these encounters happen: you're pretty much boned in one way or another. The encounters are more irritating than they are challenging/fun. 3. Saving is the last major issue. The menu has the "save game" click right next to the "return to main menu" click, and so it's easy to screw up and save if you don't mean to. Furthermore, once you die or win, your save self-deletes itself. It no longer appears on the main menu. Not easily being able to return to a save point was annoying. It was primarily annoying because of the random encounters.

I've been engrossed for about 20 hours now but feel the game feels unfinished with a few bugs and not enough content as a whole. I've played untimed goaless easy mode the most and never won once (once killing 629 of 601 zombies?) but won the first time I played helicopter/ hard mode. The custom content generator is a nice touch but it has crashed everytime I've tried adding characters. I respect that the creators have gone towards the 'walking dead' style with constant relationship problems. The number of useless characters and petty bickering is maddening, I realise they are going for the 'walking dead' style but still I have had to send so many characters off to their doom just for some peace and quiet. The fatigue and hunger aspect is a nice touch but it's very hard to detect tiredness and hunger until it's too late. I've had characters suddenly fall asleep half way through important breach and barricading jobs. The characters could be fleshed out a little more with some dialogue and more art and I feel the game could do with some more sound and music. It's new, it's a great idea but it's not quite finished yet.