Day Zero

TheAwakening
Jun 30
3 min read

Updated: Jul 10

Overview

Day Zero embarks you, the reader, on the start of a zombie apocalypse, which you must survive by reading the walls of text. This is not a 3D world where you can freely walk and see the hordes of zombies coming at you. You must read carefully and make the right choices within a small time frame; the apocalypse will not wait for you. It also includes quick-time events to keep you paying attention.

Story

You are a normal person living a normal life with your partner, your friends, your job, etc. But what happens when all hell breaks loose in just a day? The news is commenting about rabid animals and how they are infecting humans.

You are not surprised to see the effects are spreading like a plague within a short time. After waking up the next day, you and your partner catch the latest news, an emergency broadcast. Everyone must stay inside their houses, lock and secure them, and save on food for the days to come. And of course that means no getting out and having zero contact with anyone showing infectious symptoms.

Sooner after that, someone knocks at your door. A college student, having witnessed the hell that is outside, rushes down to the first shelter available. This is the proof that all of what you’ve seen is real, and you have a choice to make. You can stay hidden inside your home or get up on your car and drive away to the unpopulated forest.

Whatever your choice is, it will set the story forward. Will you make it to the end or become zombie food?

Gameplay

The entire game is played by reading the story alone. You may skip the text animation by pressing space if you want to speed things up. However, if the current page has a choice to make, you have a few seconds to choose the option you want to take, or the game will randomly choose left or right. An input is not necessary; you can let the game choose for you and keep reading. However, if it is a life-or-death choice, the game might take the former. You can select the choice by highlighting with A or D on the keyboard; there is no mouse input at all.

When the story is at a crucial moment, you will be faced with a quick-time event. You must press F when the needle in the circle is at the blue mark in order to progress successfully. That is the only way the story will require your attention, besides the short amount of time to make a choice. Should you fail it somehow and meet your demise, you will return to the main menu, where you can continue and retry that segment or start a new story.

The only other gameplay core is its difficulty. On Easy you can rewind to a choice as many times as you want, on Normal you have up to three rewinds for the whole story, and on Hard you cannot rewind by yourself. There are achievements you can earn depending on your choices, but it will take multiple runs to get them all.

Audio & Visuals

There are no sound effects at all, only music that changes depending on the current story’s situation. The menu features a shot of the home of our character, dead silent and with fog creeping in. Because the game is text only, the background images are our only visual source, but some are clearly not visible enough. The field of text has its own background to fit with the setting, where it can be purple colored, entirely black, or the color of blood.

Pros & Cons

Pros

An interactive story with multiple paths.
Text adventure; the graphics are your imagination.
QTE to keep you from idling.
Decent soundtrack.

Cons

The text is translated from Turkish to English with AI assistance. There are many pronoun mistakes.
The Steam Store page screenshots are not updated with the current game build.
Difficulty seems unnecessary for this adventure.

Rating: 6/10

A dateable survivor? Sure, why not? YOLO. (Oh, shoot, we are married already.)