- [RoboKast] There are an absurd number of zombie games on the market. It seems like every few years, there's just a handful of games that come out with a lot of potential, and most of them kind of flop. A good example is "Back 4 Blood." It was supposed to be a really good game made by some of the team
that made "Left 4 Dead," and for some reason, the
game was just average. But what if I told you that
there was another zombie game that was nowhere near average, one that looked like it came out in 1995, played the same music over and
over again for hours on end, and infuriated you so badly that you wanted to quit games
altogether and become a monk, one where you spend two hours organizing your virtual
house just to inevitably die because you tripped on literal
air into a pile of zombies? Sounds like a terrible game, doesn't it? But here's the thing: It's the most addictive
survival game I've ever played. And while it looks stupid on the surface, it will easily entertain you for hundreds or even thousands of hours. In short, "Project Zomboid"
is absolutely awesome, and some of the reasons
why will blow your mind. You'd be surprised how much
this little ugly-looking game is hiding under the surface. But first, let me give you the rundown of what this game is
about. (clears throat) You survive the zombie apocalypse. No, actually, you don't survive it, ever, because you drive like
an obese American woman in an electric scooter
and you're suffering from an endless wave of
boredom because nothing kills more than not doing a
goddamn crossword puzzle every five minutes when you're
trying to survive in hell. Speaking of hell, the game
takes place in rural Kentucky. - Howdy, folks. This
is me, Colonel Sanders. - [RoboKast] While in the
beautiful state of Kentucky, you play as one of the people left behind, struggling to survive
the zombie apocalypse. You aren't some hero warlord
Rick Grimes character. No, you are Joe Shmoe, and your skills are lacking in
pretty much every department. No, literally, your character
is straight-up useless. You can't do anything on your own. And also, your journey
is gonna be a hard one. You will die a lot. You will never have a
run where you don't die. I mean, the game even tells
you this in the beginning. But yet, you'll keep trying, and you will keep dying every single time. And the game never gets old. I don't think I can even
attempt to put into perspective how many stupid ways
you'll die in this game. For example, one time, after surviving for a very long time and
fortifying an entire base, loading it with food, getting my own car, and having great skills and
weapons and even a companion, I was feeling comfortable. We'd killed dozens of
zombies in our front yard, and, well, the homeowner's
association was gonna fine us. So I figured, hey, why
not burn the zombies? My friend Nolan and I spent almost an hour piling up every single
dead zombie in the region and starting a fire to burn them, but for some reason, they wouldn't burn. So as I inched closer to
investigate what the problem was, I caught on fire. It's okay, it's okay. Easy solution. In my house, I have running water. I could just go put the fire out. Let me just run inside
and turn on the shower, because why not? This is gonna be so easy. So I enter the house, turn on the shower, and unfortunately, I was a
little bit too slow and I died, and I lost all my skills,
and it was really annoying. But again, even with
this, it's not a big deal. Yeah, it does suck, but I could
just create a new character and find my friend and return
to our base because the world that you live in continues
even when you die, so whenever you die, your old character will become a zombie. You can just kill 'em, grab your stuff, and continue on your journey. So in theory, this sounded good, but no. The game said fuck you. While I made the journey back
to our fully geared house that we spent hours fortifying, my flaming corpse caught the
entire fucking house on fire, burning everything and all of
our progress in the process. And best of all, the goddamn pile of zombies
survived the entire thing. Welcome to "Project Zomboid," a game that we're gonna
break down and analyze to determine why exactly it's so awesome. If you've played this game and have had experiences
like the one I just told you, please tell me your best
stories in the comments, where people can really get a feel for the misery that
they're missing out on. So in "Project Zomboid," you explore the absolutely enormous map and go where you want to go
based on your ideal playstyle. Do you like taking it easy
and staying relatively safe? Live in the woods and make occasional supply
runs into the cities. Want more of a challenge? Live in Louisville, and you
will regret it, my friend. The good thing is you
aren't just Joe Shmoe like I said earlier, but you're actually your
own handcrafted version of Joe Shmoe when you play this game. When creating your character, you can pick one of 21 occupations. These are basically skill
buffs in specific categories based on what your
hypothetical character did before the apocalypse started. These jobs include things
like a firefighter, which buffs your strength and axe skills, a carpenter that helps you
excel with base building, and a burglar that allows you to more easily sneak past zombies. This creates the foundation
for your character and allows you to build
upon it further with traits. Traits are either positive or negative, and you have to balance the cost of them to equal out to zero. Your character can't be too OP, so you have to choose your
negative traits wisely based on your survival plan and your goal. So you can be an overweight, muscle-bound, deaf, illiterate, chain-smoking lumberjack if you wanna roleplay as
a resident of Kentucky. I almost always go with a lumberjack because I love using axes
and pickaxes for combat. Not gonna lie, sometimes
they're pretty OP, and in my last few
characters, I picked traits that made me able to see better at night and to learn new skills quickly. But on the other hand, I was also underweight
and drove extremely slow. This balance worked
perfectly with my playstyle and allowed me to make the game feel like my own before I inevitably died. This combination and possibility
for different playstyles is the first thing that makes
"Project Zomboid" stand out among a sea of stupid survival games. Sure, games like "The
Forest" are a lot of fun and they're really solid games, but after you've played it a few times, you don't really care to play it again because it's the exact same
experience every single time. Because of the skills and the
traits in "Project Zomboid" and some other things that I'm
gonna talk about in a second, it is truly infinitely replayable. Infinitely replayable games are great because they hold your
interest for a lot longer than other games and they're
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for sponsoring this video. So once you finish making your character, you spawn into the world and
it's time to start surviving. But like I said, this isn't
some surface-level survival game and you're gonna have
to work hard to ensure that you survive your impending doom. Your biggest threat is
obviously the zombies. While they're weak and easy
to handle in small numbers, like children, these
things are everywhere, and if you aren't careful,
they can easily overwhelm you and cause your inevitable death. I mean, you can literally
just push them on the ground and stomp on them when
there's only one or two, but when there's a big group, they're gonna be a lot more difficult and you gotta be a lot more strategic. If you do get bitten by
a zombie, you're dead. 100% of the time, you will die. It'll take time and you'll
slowly turn, but you will die, and there's nothing you can do about it. This makes it where you have
to be extremely strategic with every interaction, and
if you get overly comfortable, well, see you in hell. There's been times where
I was playing with friends and I was stupid geared with
the best vehicle in the game and guns and armor and all sorts of stuff, but I died because I got too confident and got overwhelmed by a
large number of zombies when I literally had a
fucking minigun in my hand. I had a minigun and I still died because I got overly confident. You have to stay on
your toes at all times, and you have to make
sure you have the skills that you need to survive. And these skills are really
important with your playstyle because sometimes, your
character can be struggling. He could be scared, anxious, overwhelmed, bored, and all sorts of other effects that drastically affect your gameplay. So for example, if you make
a character who's afraid of the outdoors, he's
gonna get overwhelmed even easier when he's fighting zombies. But if you make a character
that's afraid of the indoors, while you're trying to set
up your base and survive, he's gonna go crazy and wanna get outside. So these are all things to think about while you're building your character. You start out with some
some base-level skills that change depending on
what occupation you picked, but you need to evolve these skills and work to expand your
consciousness as a player if you wanna make it in
this unforgiving world. You have to read books
and complete actions to increase your skill levels, and it's absolutely necessary
to make it later in the game. For example, you first spawn in, and the world isn't too harsh. There's a lot of loot in
buildings, and I mean, the city even has power and water. How hard could it be? But after two weeks, the power and the water
turns off and you need to make sure you have a
high enough carpentry skill to make rain catchers
and an electric skill that can help you power your
fridge with a generator. Mechanics are important because
every single goddamn part in your car could break and be replaced, and farming is required if you wanna have a sustainable food
source later in the game. You can read books to get XP boosts that make learning these
skills a bit faster, and you can do actions like
disassembling furniture or hotwiring cars to get the experience to increase your skill level. So you need the skills to
survive, but that is not all. This game is actually
surprisingly complex, and it takes a lot of thinking
about what you're doing in order to make it in this goddamn world. This simple-looking
isometric survival game is the most detailed
game I've ever played, and no, I'm not exaggerating. You can break windows, but if you don't pull the
glass out of the frame, you can cut yourself and start
bleeding or rip your clothes. Your character gets bored and
can cause him to be unhappy if he doesn't do anything
for entertainment. You need keys to drive
cars, and you somehow have to actually find those keys in the world. Crops can get diseased
and the disease can spread between crops if you
don't take care of it, which you can actually
do by using cigarettes to make insecticide. You can make a near-unlimited number of food dishes based on the ingredients that you choose to put into the pot. You can control the AC in your car to cool yourself off if you're too hot. If you're in the front seat of a cop car and you wanna get in the
back, you actually have to get out of the car
because the game accounted for the divider thing that's
in the back of cop cars. You can take your shoes
off to walk more quietly around buildings without
detecting zombies. If you shoot out of the window of your car with a two-handed weapon, it won't allow you to steer
while you're doing it, but if you shoot with
a pistol or something that takes one hand, you can still steer. And these things are just the surface. There are hundreds of
little design choices in "Project Zomboid" that build
upon the core gameplay loop to make it to where you
really have to focus on every single action to stay alive, and I think that's why this
game is so goddamn immersive and why it hooked my friends
and I for hours on end. I don't even know the best way to communicate how detailed this game is. Like, if your clothes are wet, you can set them out outside to dry faster by just setting them on the ground. I really appreciate when
games do stuff like this because the game just works
how you would expect it to in real life. Sometimes, games limit you, but this game does not limit you at all, and anything that you think
should work most likely does. And that's why it hooked my friends and I for hours and hours on end. A lot of survival games
become mindless over time. Back to the example of "The Forest," you eventually build a big-ass megabase, and you no longer have to worry about the cannibals fucking you up. And while the game is fun, the strategy is just to get bigger and stronger and make everything easier. It becomes simple, and you don't have to think
about what you need to do in order to survive because
all the risk is gone. You're completely geared. But in "Zomboid," there is never
a dull, thoughtless moment. As you're working on fortifying your base, you're gonna run out of food. When you go out on a food
run, you're gonna need to find some medicine to heal
your newly acquired problems. Once you heal yourself, you realize that the power's going out in a few days and you need to get rain
catchers in order to have water. But to do that, you're gonna
need to learn carpentry, which requires you to go out on a run to disassemble all of
the goddamn furniture in Kentucky, which requires more food, and then you get back and
your base has been destroyed, and the cycle never
ends, and Jesus Christ, someone please gimme a Xanax. This is stressful. The level between challenge and anxiety in this game sits perfectly in the middle, which, as I talked about in my last video on why AAA games are boring
now, is the perfect place for something to be an enjoyable activity. And with everything, after
all of that challenge, you're still gonna die. It's inevitable. When you die, sure, you lose hours of skill-building and effort and probably some of your
items, but like I said earlier, you can actually respond
as a new character and find your old one as a
zombie to get your stuff back and take residence in your old base. Since you're playing
as a generic survivor, your next character is
another generic survivor in the ever-changing desperate
world that's been shaped by all of the previous survivors. All of these things help to make "Project Zomboid"
the perfect survival game. But there are some other
things that are the icing on the cake, and these things start with the most important
part of all of this: the passion that the developers
have for their product. This game is nine years old, and the small team has continued to update it regularly,
not with stupid shit but actually with innovative
game-changing mechanics that improve the game even further. They're even currently working
on their biggest update yet that adds NPCs into the world,
which is honestly insane. The game is already near perfect, and with the continuous updates and support by the developers, "Project Zomboid" is going to become an indie survival game icon, and the whole community
is supporting this game and helping to make that dream possible. "Project Zomboid" has some
of the best modding support out of any game I've ever seen, and with thousands of
Workshop mods on the market, you can tailor the experience to be whatever you want it to be. So what we have here is an
infinitely replayable game with an infinite number of mods and support from the developers. It's a game that's constantly
changing and immerses you unlike any other survival
game on the market. And best of all, you can do it all with friends in multiplayer if you don't wanna face the
unforgiving world on your own. And that, my friend, is why
"Project Zomboid" is so awesome. What are your experiences
with "Project Zomboid"? Share your cool stories in the comments to show other people how
awesome this game can be, and make sure to drop a like,
subscribe, and share this with a friend if you think
they would enjoy this game. Also, just wanted to remind
you to play "Enlisted" using my link in the description, and thanks again to them
for sponsoring this video. I will see you guys next time, and peace. (upbeat music)
