Despite these issues, do I like Dead State? I think so.
The mountainous list of responsibilities quickly becomes a second heartbeat. It flows with you. It orders your steps, your decisions, becomes central to all your major decisions. And when you’re least careful, it swallows you whole, dragging you into the heart of the experience. Dead State, like any good simulator, makes it easy to forget that you’re just a tourist, a visitor to this terrible land. Its ability to cultivate a suspension of disbelief even makes the game’s banal locations — supermarkets, pharmacies, and sleazy bars are everywhere on the map, just waiting to be unearthed — interesting. Dead State might well be the first game to have me excited at the discovery of an abandoned picnic.
As the world opens up and various crises occur, flavour is added to the functional processes that underpin the existence of the shelter and its inhabitants. The Crisis Events are especially important, and involve you being dragged centerstage into a community-based conflagration, where your opinion may make or break how the others view you. My first was disastrous. I opted to let the placid Davis experiment with a better water source and it caused a missionary and a sheriff to disapprove heavily of my “wishy-washy” behaviour. Whether by accident or not, this then led to the disappearance of my best melee fighter, and another bevy of complaints and requests. Problematic? Certainly, but also appealingly nail-biting as the Crisis Events make it clear that you can’t please everyone and that there is no right or wrong to anything in this game, only different shades of reality.
There are also many new allies to discover, providing an escape from the repetitive banter of those initial companions. But even as the game opens up, it is not without its problems. Technical issues arise from time to time – characters will occasionally glide, instead of walk, and they will clip through walls like part-time magicians.
Dead State is also a slow burn. Fences take hundreds of hours to build. Events unfold slowly over days, rather than at your whim. And resources? Resources are definitely scarce. Much of Dead State involves figuring out how to maintain a steady flow of food and fuel and luxury items and parts and whatever else your little commune needs, because they evaporate as quickly as water in the Sahara. The game will make you grit your teeth in frustration.
But it is also very good at making you feel triumphant.
I caught myself crowing in delight today, after cleaning out a supermarket of its goods. I killed twenty zombies, all without losing a single ally to infection or sudden death. My haul? About fifty pounds of food, ten gallons of fuel, and a pocketful of fresh berries. A pittance, really, given how quickly my survivors eat through their rations, and how rapidly the generator drains our fuel supplies. But it was more than anything I had acquired in the last three game days. Enough for me to last one night without going onto the field. (Which I will still do, but hey. The luxury of choice is a luxury indeed.)
And if that isn’t a success in this dead-eat-not-dead world, I don’t know what is.
