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Saying Project Zomboid has a bit of a learning curve is like saying Mount Everest's slopes are a little steep. Staying alive in The Indie Stone's isometric survival sim means taking care of your basic needs – eating, drinking, sleeping – whilst avoiding its zombies like the plague, because… well, they have a plague, and a single bite will fatally transmit it to you. If you can manage all of that, it only gets harder. Power and water are soon shut off, and as tinned food dwindles, you'll need to build raincatchers and plant veggies to stay fed.
But hey – look on the bright side! If you're new to Zomboid, agriculture is something you'll not have to worry about for a long time, because you'll be dead long before those broccoli bloom. As someone who's played Project Zomboid for years – I sincerely think it's the best survival sim around – I've taken for granted many of the accumulative skills and tricks that make staying alive easier. The same can't be said for two of my friends, who have just picked up Project Zomboid and are having A Time trying to survive for longer than a day. I've been trying to help them, teaching them the ways of Knox County while trying to keep my own character chugging along, and it's given me a newfound appreciation for Project Zomboid's brutal realism.
This is how you died
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In the time it takes me to join our server, both of my fledgling wards have already died. One doesn't realize it yet – he got away from some zombies with "just a bite" and I have to break the bad news – while the other has been torn to shreds in a parking lot. To their credit, the opening minutes of any Zomboid playthrough are often the hardest. You've got no real weapon, your character's skills are still low, and trying to fend off individual zombies creates noise that larger hordes are drawn to. When you're a new player, that's all made worse by the fact that you have no idea where you are (random spawns, baby!), and are yet to learn how to fight zombies without getting bitten.
Through sheer luck, my friends respawn near the two-story house I've started in. I gather both of them and for the next in-game day, our suburb in the town of Muldraugh becomes an unlikely survival bootcamp. Because Zomboid has so many mechanics in play, a lot of its systems aren't the easiest to understand. We start with basics like opening containers and managing inventories (yes, you need a can opener to crack open that tin of beans you're clutching like gold), before moving on to killing zombies.
Because fighting is so inherently dangerous – a single bite is lethal, but even smaller scratches still have a chance of transmitting the infection – dealing with the undead requires an awkward dance of pushing and back-stepping until they fall over, at which point you can stomp on their head until they're dead again. Even then, limited stamina means you can't do this infinitely, and fighting multiple zombies compounds everything, which means our next tutorial is on cleaning and dressing scratches. A lot of this is second-nature to seasoned Zomboid fans, but teaching my friends to keep their bandages clean and watch for signs of infection makes me appreciate just how deep Zomboid's systems have become over the years.
...Whether you've played this game for years, days, or minutes, there's only one way it ends
With those basics locked down, it's time for our first real test: a supply run on a nearby warehouse, where I'm hoping to arm us with axes and find the building supplies necessary to fortify our house. It's only a few blocks away, so by avoiding main roads and cutting through gardens we get there fairly easily. Zombies have torn down part of the warehouse's chain-link fence, which I'm told is what led to my friend's last death. As proof, the flayed body of his last character lies between us and the warehouse. In hindsight, I should've clocked that bloody mess as the foreshadowing it was. More importantly, I should have made sure the horde responsible wasn't in the area.
But neither of those things happened. Eager to get axes in the hands of survivors, we flock to the warehouse's main building in search of a way in. Our elation at finding one turns to horror, as clambering through an unlocked window sets off one of the randomly-generated house alarms that are created every time you make a new Zomboid save. In seconds, the fence gap we came in through is clogged with undead drawn by the noise, while the road onto the premises is quickly filling up with tens of infected. Surrounded on all sides, everyone panics and sprints in different directions. One friend runs headlong down the road and – through sheer luck – trips and falls through a small gap in the horde, getting through with only a few cuts. Another sticks by me and we play high-stakes Marco Polo, circling and ducking through zombies until there's an opening in the fence to run through.
But when a new Project Zomboid playthrough begins, it doesn't just sprinkle house-alarmed death traps through Knox County. It also plasters the message "This is how you died" across your screen, warning of a single inescapable truth: whether you've played this game for years, days, or minutes, there's only one way it ends. The friend that escaped on his lonesome was chased into the wilderness outside of town (an honest-to-god impressive feat of running) before being caught by a zombie hidden in shrubbery. The pal that stuck by me through the fence makes it home to our suburban paradise, only to realize that he's been bitten in the chaos. We've also lured a sizable horde back home, which falls to me to deal with. But hours spent passing on my wisdom has unwittingly given me an ego – the worst thing to have in Zomboid – and I bite off more than I can chew, which isn't a problem shared by the crowd that eats me.
The basics of Zomboid are easy to teach. But the game's single unshakeable truth – that you will die, no matter what – is insidiously hard to learn. The more you know about Zomboid, the less you feel it applies to you. But that's not true, and perhaps it took me dying to impart that. Since then we've all made new characters and we're having a blast trying to build the fortress of our dreams. I'm also about to try Zomboid's newly-added Build 42, which doesn't yet have multiplayer enabled but does have basements, chickens, and pigs – which I'm excited to discover in that order. But as I get to grips with grander concepts like animal husbandry, I'll have a newfound appreciation for the smaller details that got us here in the first place. Yes, you need a can opener to eat tinned food – and that's wonderful.
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