I have been talking to some friends about what games I should be playing and it ultimately settled on Grounded and Project Zomboid. I just wanted to jot down how I am feeling after the first five-hour introduction of Project Zomboid.

Project Zomboid is a survival horror game from The Indie Stone. Zomboid is going to be celebrating its 10-year anniversary of release this November and retails for $20.

• Solo blows. This is a game to either play with friends or on a server with a bunch of people to roleplay with.
• The tutorial is great on-boarding but it does not ready the player with the sheer volume of content the game offers.
  • Reading, writing, dressing for the weather, exercising, a fucking boredom meter. The game literally has it all.
  • I don’t know how to deal with depression in real life and I’ll never know how to deal with it in a game.
• Best menus in any video game. It is so easy to remember how to check your health, loot to a specific bag and even equip and unequip items that have been nailed down pat.
  • I like, generally, how the injury system works and everything that goes into patching yourself up.
• This is the most authentic video game to ever grace my computer. Everything feels so incredibly genuine. The ways I died are funny and sometimes they were just bad happenstance.
  • I once was running from a horse and jumped into a home filled with almost the same amount of zombies.
  • I was on the second floor of a hotel looting and I was being swarmed by both sides, I jumped off the balcony, badly hurt my ankle, and proceeded to jump into a pool full of zombies.
• Looting is the epitome of risk vs. reward. You cannot just go out and loot. You have to weigh the amount of time, and the number of zombies before hitting a place to loot. Go over your head? DEAD.
• Vanilla Zomboid is fun but the mods are clearly the way to go. A friend of mine shared a video of what mods are just good quality-of-life improvements and so far they have been fantastic.
• I like the vision system. It really creates authentic scenarios when you cannot see what is behind you.
• The camera angle is really good too. I don’t really know how to explain it further but it is really good.
• I’d imagine that Project Zomboid looked good when it came out, and it really holds up.

Project Zomboid is a game, literally, ten years in the making. It takes a lot to get used to all the systems and menus, but once you get a decent grasp of the game, it is an absolute blast to play.

8/10 would recommend it to friends and family.