Dead State - Review @RPS

Although Alec Meer criticises a lot of game systems in Dead State: Reanimated, he pays his respect at the end of his review for Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

I do like it, though. Quite a lot more so than this piece probably suggests, and that’s because it’s a game which is far more successful in theme and tone (harder to convey in text) than it is in features. Getting through another day feels meaningful despite the barrage of numbers and the parroted lines. Fights are chilling, flexible and unpredictable rather than perfunctory. Error is a result of your choices rather than an enforced event. The wider world is a sinister, uncharted mystery, with your never quite knowing what’s out there until you encounter it. Decisions are painful. People are problematic. Murder feels bad. The downbeat prettiness of its world is littered with small details, hints of the communities that once were and the fearful squatters that have replaced them.

In terms of recreating the second act of an … of the Dead or 28 x Later film, that point where the world has fallen, scattered survivors have found shared refuge and now they need to take risks to maintain it, Dead State is probably as close as we get. I would say that Dead State probably has too many parts and doesn’t quite know how to fit them all together cleanly, but it just about manages to be more than the sum of them.