Zombies are classic horror monsters for myriad reasons. As a species, we have the privilege of being very aware of our mortality and can ruminate and philosophise about this morbid topic until the undead cows come home.
What we’ve done with this is turn death into the focus of life - how to extend life, how to live the best life with the limited time we have, how to behave with respect to a possible afterlife, all questions that take up far too much time. In this way, death pervades life, and that’s why zombies are so horrifying. They are perversions of the natural conclusion and are often twisted into something so inhuman through hallmarks such as cannibalism, disjointed movements, and a lack of personality. On the surface they are human beings, but beneath is all, nothing we hold sacred about life remains.
I’ve never played a game that utilises zombies as effectively as7 Days to Die. I’ve played plenty of survival games where you make bases, but not one of them do it like this one. On the surface, 7DTD is quite generic - it’s a survival crafter that has you exploring points of interest, killing random and hand-placed zombies, and making your own equipment, medicine, and food. And so it goes, for seven days.
On the seventh night, however, a blood moon rises. Wave after wave of zombies, who usually only shambled but now run at you with breakneck speed, spawn just over the horizon, locked onto your location and out for blood. Seal yourself inside a building, and they’ll tear down the walls; dig yourself into a pit, and they’ll dig you right out; ride away on a motorcycle, and they’ll hunt you til you run out of fuel.
Your only recourse is to fight them off, pumping arrows and bullets into the neverending horde and whacking away at them in a panic when you run out of ammo. If you make it to dawn, a wave of relief will wash over you - only to be replaced by the horror that this will happen every seven days.
Hordes only get stronger as time passes. Regular zombies get replaced with those that spit acid and those that explode on contact. Adapting on the fly is a core component of these horrid nights.
Your first blood moon is terrifying because you have no idea what to expect. The next blood moon is even scarier because you know exactly what’s coming. Thus, the genius of 7DTD is revealed - the base-building mechanics aren’t there for you to make a home; they’re there for you to make a fortress. Spike traps and mines aren’t niche weapons to be deployed in a pinch; they’re vital defensive tools that you’ll need to invest serious time into crafting.
I play with my partner, and we’ve played enough to develop a streamlined process for dealing with horde nights. I’m in charge of ensuring our weapons are the best they can be, we have up-to-date armour, and our ammo reserves are fit to burst, while he spends days fortifying our base with reinforced blocks and better traps.
Our bases are not designed with comfort in mind; we utilise chokepoints, designing our fortresses (usually renovated gas stations) to funnel zombies through different elevations so we can pick them off before they reach us. We store everything on the roof, with zombie vultures being picked off by our jerry-rigged turrets. We know that zombies take the path of least resistance, so we create those paths for them, mazelike structures that we can walk on top of, shooting up a pile of undead bodies at each steel door checkpoint.
This is how we play the game now - before this, we spent many horde nights panicking that our trenches filled with wooden spikes wouldn’t hold the zombies off (they didn’t), that our church would get invaded (it did), and that we’d end up losing a ton of progress thanks to repeated deaths, with zombies swarming our spawn locations (we did).
The way 7DTD makes base building a core component of the survival game loop rather than an incidental feature is the highlight for me and is evidence of a keen understanding of how to use the innate horror that zombies possess to its greatest extent. you may make the most extensive base with the thickest walls and be surrounded by friends and still feel like your next night will be your last, and this is why 7 Days to Die is the survival game I keep coming back to.
Survival Week at TheGamer is brought to you by Nightingale -available on PC in early access February 20
Survival Week
Welcome to the home of TheGamer’s Survival Week, a celebration of all things, well, survival. Here you’ll find features, interviews, and more dedicated to this popular genre, brought to you by Inflexion Games' upcoming open-world survival crafter, Nightingale.
