I love a good cozy game, and I love a good zombie game, but I'm not sure I've ever played a hybrid of the two. There's something inherently stressful about being surrounded by hordes of undead intent on eating your brains, but new "cozy post-apocalyptic survival game" aims to make that experience much more relaxing.
From two-person indie studio Cosmic Tofu, In the Van is marketed toward people who "play Project Zomboid like it's Stardew Valley," or in other words, people who cast zombies aside as an irksome afterthought while they hang out in their cabins, cook food, and harvest crops. So, why not just play Project Zomboid? Well, the answer's right there in the title. In the Van gives you a mobile cabin to turn into your personal chill space and protect yourself from the perils of the outside, post-apocalyptic world.
"Scavenge by day, drive back before dark, and spend the night cooking, farming, and cracking open phones recovered from the dead to find out what happened to the world," reads the official description. Essentially, it sounds like a more forgiving, cozy focused Project Zomboid but instead of a cabin, your home is a customizable van, which sounds like a delightful spin.
Cosmic Tofu says you'll find your zen in the game when you "master the survival routine" by balancing exploration, item crafting, and survival elements "at your own pace," and if that sounds challenging amidst a zombie apocalypse, In the Van's reveal trailer (above) makes it pretty clear that this specific variety of zombie isn't particularly hard to kill. You'll even be able to plow through zombie clusters with the van itself, which I suppose can be cozy depending on your tolerance for blood.
Speaking of which, Cosmic Tofu has done its best to appease cozy gamers who might be turned off by the whole zombie apocalypse thing, calling the game's undead walkers "cute little Stardew-ish pixel zombie friends" and begging moderators not to mark the post NSFW after an earlier post was marked as sensitive for "setting a zombie on fire."
There's no release date for In the Van yet, but Cosmic Tofu says a closed playtest is coming soon.
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