For decades, the concept of “the zombie” has gripped games and movie buffs around the world. It’s a trope of the horror genre, and it has been done in more ways than anyone would care to count. In gaming, the zombie apocalypse is a setting that has been explored countless times, and it almost always produces a title or a franchise that is equal parts intense and terrifying.
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At the heart of the zombie game is the zombie itself – the flesh-hungry, bloodthirsty undead creature that stalks the streets of whatever environment they find themselves in. For what seems like forever, players have been laying waste to zombie hordes, but in the last two decades or so, some franchises have emerged that boast truly terrifying, impossibly threatening zombies that sometimes – just sometimes – present a true challenge.
As The Walking Dead (TV series) gathered steam, fans began crying out for a game-based representation of the franchise. Telltale Games took to the stage, producing an episodic game simply titled The Walking Dead.
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In The Walking Dead, zombies – better known as ‘walkers’ – are something horrifying, as a single bite is enough quite often to wipe out an entire settlement. Once one survivor turns, the chances of them going on to infect others is remarkably high, and while walkers are traditionally slow and quite dumb, they’re strong, tenacious, and highly virulent.
7 The Last Of Us
There are arguments against calling the creatures found in The Last of Us “zombies.” They’re infected with the Cordyceps fungus, which rots their brain, drives them insane, and mutates them into violent killing machines. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…
Most of The Last of Us is set decades after the initial outbreak that kills billions of people, with the survivors banding together to scrape up some kind of life following the apocalypse. However, the infected are still everywhere, and they’re incredibly dangerous. As they get “older,” they get stronger, and they become subject to mutations that make them even tougher to defeat. And, if a survivor winds up in a place that has played host to infected individuals for too long, they can get infected themselves simply by breathing the same air.
6 Project Zomboid
Project Zomboid is an ambitious and innovative game widely regarded as one of the best zombie-focused titles out there. It’s also seriously challenging, and intense, and a player can find themselves facing a Game Over screen in the blink of an eye.
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In Project Zomboid, the zombies are relatively run-of-the-mill, but it’s the nature of the game that makes them so threatening. As it’s a super-realistic simulator title of sorts, a single scratch or one bite has the potential to turn an otherwise healthy survivor into a shambler. Not only that but if a player has an open wound, and they come into contact with a zombie, that itself can be enough to bring on the infection. That is if they don’t fall prey to a swarm of undead first…
5 Dead Space
Dead Space‘s Necromorphs are some of the most terrifying undead enemies ever concocted. They’re re-animated corpses brought back to life – in a way – by an alien infection that essentially re-writes their DNA and makes them extremely aggressive.
In Dead Space, Necromorphs quite literally come out of the walls, charging at the player with razor-sharp limbs and the power to pull them to pieces in a matter of seconds. They’re drastically difficult to kill, if only for the reason that they flail so wildly the limbs that are actually their weak points. There are plenty of insta-death animations in Dead Space that can attest to the sheer threatening abilities of the Necromorphs.
4 Days Gone
In Days Gone, a zombie plague wipes out most of the population of the world, and the player assumes the role of Deacon St. John, a biker-turned-survivor left to explore the apocalypse. When Days Gone was released in 2019, it brought with it a revolutionary engine that allowed hundreds of infected to band together in a dense, horrifying swarm, charging headlong at the player.
At the most intense point, something like five hundred “Freakers” will face down St. John with a terrifying sense of tenacity, refusing to give up the chase and fighting him down to the last infected individual. There are mutated variants to these Freakers, some of which are incredibly powerful, and they all contribute to the overwhelming sense that Days Gone boasts a seriously threatening atmosphere.
3 Dying Light 2
Following the outbreak in Dying Light (2015), the original zombie virus was quelled, only for it to break out once again shortly after, effectively spreading like wildfire and wiping out almost the entire population of planet Earth.
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Given that there has been so much time between the original outbreak and the ultimate outbreak in Dying Light 2, the infected have had much longer to develop. In Dying Light 2, terrifying mutations abound, and even the most mundane, stock-standard zombies pose a considerable threat to the player. Not only that but there are so many zombies roaming the apocalyptic wasteland of Dying Light 2 that it seems unrealistic to think anyone could ever scratch a living together.
2 Plague Inc.
In Plague Inc., the chief objective is to send out a virus, plague, or infection that ultimately wipes out the entire planet in as short a period of time as possible. While Plague Inc. originally launched with relatively traditional, non-complex infections and diseases, it quickly expanded to include some bizarre and horrific conditions, such as murderous AI, nanobots, and yes, a zombie virus.
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At this point, the player takes on the role of the “bad guy” orchestrating the chaos from behind a screen, sending out the Necroa Virus and ordering it to become as powerful as possible. There’s no limit to how much terror the player can sow around the world, and although government forces may rise up and fight back, there’s very little that can stop these zombies from spreading the virus and destroying the planet.
1 State of Decay 2
State of Decay 2 offers up a unique situation wherein players are tasked with building up their defenses and surviving the apocalypse, rather than attempting to ultimately defeat it. In State of Decay 2, players can become infected with a devastating disease known as the Blood Plague, which eventually turns them into rotting corpses, bound to wander the Earth in search of their next meal forever.
It’s a violent infection that creates some awfully mutated creatures, and it can be passed to survivors through a single attack even if that survivor isn’t bitten. Furthermore, densely-infected buildings that are home to “Plague Hearts” can exacerbate an infection simply when the survivor is in the presence of the heart itself. It’s terrifying and absolutely threatening.
