Undying has been in Steam Early Access for the last 2 years, but still doesn’t feel like it’s done.
The final version of the game, which arrived on Steam earlier this month, is still distinctly rough around the edges. If this is supposed to be the complete version of Undying, I have to figure that it was kicked out the door maybe six months early. It’s still playable and even a little addictive, but Undying needs another translation pass and a few mechanical tweaks before I could give it an unqualified recommendation.
Undying is set in 1992, in the final days of a full-scale zombie outbreak that has destroyed a small American city. Anling Chan Moore is about to be evacuated to safety with her 8-year-old son Cody when the zombies suddenly break through the military’s perimeter. In the ensuing confusion, Anling saves Cody, but gets bit and infected in the process.
Without any better ideas, Anling takes Cody back to their old neighborhood, which is devastated but mostly abandoned. She knows she’s infected, but all the available information on this particular disease indicates Anling’s got at least a month before she turns. That gives her 30 days to figure out how to get Cody to safety, or at least make sure he can take care of himself once she’s gone.
At first glance, Undying is another zombie/survival/stealth game in the same vein as DayZ or State of Decay, albeit with a unique graphic style and a smaller focus. You’re stuck in a wrecked city and have to cobble together food, potable water, weapons, and supplies from whatever you can find lying around, all while dodging and/or fighting the undead.
What sets Undying apart is that your character is already doomed. Anling is on borrowed time from the second you start the game, but Cody isn’t. Your long-term goal is to find a way to get Cody to safety before Anling’s infection takes over, but in the short term, you can gradually teach Cody the skills he’ll need to survive.
By herself, Anling is one of the most competent protagonists in recent horror history. She doesn’t need to find recipes or progress through skill trees. Right from the start, Anling can do anything from homebrew medicine to recondition a truck engine, no external knowledge required. It’s like she’s been through this scenario at least once before.
Cody, on the other hand, is starting from scratch. The minute-to-minute gameplay in a lot of Undying involves patiently earning experience points until Cody’s capable of accomplishing things without Anling’s help. Before long, he can find hidden items, attack with a slingshot, or play his own strange minigame where you send him into darkened areas to forage for supplies.
This sounds like more of a grind than it is. You get XP for Cody simply by having him around while you’re doing typical survival things, like crafting or purifying water. Before long, Cody becomes an asset, although a few of his abilities either take longer to unlock than they should, or the listed requirements don’t seem to work.
It’s an example of that lack of polish I mentioned. Undying’s got a few of the usual stock irritations you get with any survival game, such as crafting recipes that require more or stranger materials than they should. For example, you need to find a bunch of electrical wiring to fix the non-powered garden boxes in Anling’s back yard, and it takes an entire abandoned car’s worth of scrap metal to create or fix a single crowbar.
On top of those smaller frustrations, Undying’s got a laissez-faire translation that makes it harder to follow than it needs to be, and which occasionally undercuts its more dramatic moments. The team behind Undying, Vanimals, is a Chinese indie studio, and it clearly didn’t have a native English speaker proofread the script. None of these issues are deal-breakers by themselves, but when they’re all present in the same game at once, it drags down the whole.
What kept me going despite all that is Undying’s unique sense of atmosphere. Unlike a lot of other zombie media, Undying is first and most consistently a tragedy, and it maintains that focus throughout. All the music sounds like a dirge, much of the game has the color palette of a faded photograph, and when you encounter other survivors, they’re traumatized if not insane. Almost everything about Undying’s world is focused on a feeling of melancholy if not outright despair, and in the crowded field of zombie fiction, that’s a rare thing to explore.
I’ve been tracking Undying ever since I found it hidden in a corner at E3 2019, and have been tracking its progress through Early Access. When I learned Undying was officially done, I fired it back up and honestly, expected more to have changed from the beta.
It absolutely does stake out its own identity as a survival/horror game, but I’d like to see Vanimals continue to tighten up the overall experience. This deserves a look, particularly if you’re a hardcore enough zombie fan that you appreciate different takes on the formula, but Undying has too many compounding small issues for me to feel comfortable rating it any higher than this.
