Choice of Zombies

I first played this game a long time ago (the complete version, not the Introcomp entry). I remember it being pretty mediocre back then. Now, I've decided to head back and give it another whirl.

The game adopts a humorous and snarky tone, but it really doesn't match the zombie apocalypse setting at all. There is some heavy fourth wall breaking, depending on your choices, but it didn't feel particularly witty or clever. The plot is straightforward in design as you move from one place to another, but filled with headscratchers, which I'll detail later on.

While there aren't any ROs, the game flips the gender of the companion NPCs depending on your own gender. The characters don't have much in the way of personality, and this just makes them feel even more shallow. Some of them will also do extremely obnoxious things in game, in case you needed more reasons to dislike them.

There are also a couple of things which didn't make sense, which I will talk about below.

(Spoiler - click to show) At one part, you can borrow/steal an abandoned car, but later, the game says that you have a shovel in the back because you were too lazy to take it out a while back. Huh? It's not my car.

At another point, a doctor with a stone-cold personality tells you to leave someone behind in an unsympathetic manner. This doesn't sound like something a medical professional would do so callously, even if the situation was dire.

At the shopping mall, you can spend a few hours on an electronic sim to build your shooting skills. I can buy that the mall runs on diesel generators, but it's a bit of a stretch that they'll let you waste precious power on playing videogames, even if you're trying to build your stats.

When you reach the island, you can't use your gun to break into the abandoned house. You can't retrieve anything from the boat to help you either. Does a ferry/yacht not at least have a length of rope?

Also, can't you simply remain on the boat? If you picked the yacht or ferry, it should be comfortable enough for you to survive in the water for some time, and the zombies wouldn't be able to reach you unless they can swim. You can also forage for food or water on land when the zombies aren't around in full force.

One of the endings says that the zombie plague got 'medically contained'. Huh?? What does that mean? The zombies multiply through physical contact. What does it mean to 'medically contain' them? Seeing that human civilization appears to be in shambles, who did this? A group of aliens watching from space? This part is so brief that I doubt much thought was put into it either.

Choice of Zombies came out at a time when decent choicescript games were few. But today, this just isn't it.

This is another game from near the very beginning of Choice of Games, and I think this one works well.

It's different from more 'modern' games in that each playthrough is short and there are a lot of ways to mess up or die early. So if you screw up everything your game can be significantly less than an hour, with a 'successful' game being a lot longer.

But the shortness of the dead-ends go well together, since it encourages replay and (more importantly) this game has a lot of different paths to success. You can meet completely different characters in different playthroughs. I'd say about 30% of my two playthroughs was repeated material.

I enjoyed how the stats were clearly differentiated from each other. Although, the game kept relationship stats hidden. There doesn't seem to be any romance in this game (though sex is mentioned). Each stat gets used in a variety of ways.

The characters all have different interactions with each other, some of them detesting each other.

All in all, it was short and fun.