ZombiU

Released alongside Nintendo’s biggest commercial failure, the Wii U, ZombiU managed to remain one of the best examples of its console’s unique features until the end of its lifetime. It uses the Wii U’s gamepad to great effect, providing a tense and unnerving survival horror experience that largely succeeds in turning zombies – gaming’s most popular cannon fodder – into fearsome creatures.

We play as a random survivor during the zombie apocalypse. In the game’s brief intro, this survivor comes across a safehouse in London, where a mysterious man, who calls himself “the Prepper”, speaks over the intercom, trying to offer some advice. At first, the Prepper acts like a guide, teaching us the ropes, offering some explanations, and pointing us in the right direction. He also provides the survivor with the most important item in the game, the “Prepper Pad,” which functions as a minimap and radar. The Wii U’s gamepad, then, mirrors the Prepper Pad, displaying this information.

The story revolves around the historical figure of John Dee. Queen Elizabeth’s famous advisor is presented here as a mythical figure, a tormented seer, a maker of prophecies that none believed: “He used magical rituals to hold what he called Enochian Conversations, and among other things, these angels told him how the world would end,” one of the documents found in the game explains. John Dee apparently predicted the zombie plague, but nobody took him seriously, nobody prepared for the event – except the Prepper, of course – so, now almost everyone is dead.

There’s an important distinction at the heart of ZombiU’s narrative. It’s one thing to dismiss the repeated warnings of a scientist, and it’s another entirely to don’t heed a man’s words when he claims to be talking to angels. The first situation is based on convenience-fueled denial: since the actions necessary to prevent or mitigate a disaster usually involve a sacrifice of some sort, people tend to ignore all the evidence presented and uncritically embrace anyone who supports their position, defending that the evidence is wrong in some way. Their position is dictated by convenience and the promise of immediate comfort rather than by logic – but they still act surprised when the bill comes due.

Now, dismissing a warning by a man that declares that he has Enochian conversations is another beast altogether. This man is most probably crazy and offers no evidence to support his predictions, invoking biblical figures to induce people to act on faith alone. John Dee’s prophecy of the zombie apocalypse is called “prophecy” in the game for a reason: even though he apparently had contact with zombies himself, Dee never managed to prove any of his claims. Consequently, his warning remained in the realm of mysticism, of faith and belief.

The Prepper exemplifies the appeal of believing in such conspiracy theories. They prey on people’s paranoia and offer a sense of security and of self-importance that are very alluring to people that lack both. The Prepper’s belief in the apocalypse urged him to act: while others, ignorant to Dee’s truth, lived their oblivious lives, the Prepper prepared. Consequently, he thinks highly of himself. He belittles those that didn’t see the apocalypse coming and calls himself by a name that reveals how it’s all a matter of pride to him.

His characterization, then, undergoes an interesting movement: at first, we are to take his every word as gospel, believing that he knows what he’s talking about. If he was organizing for the zombie apocalypse, he probably had some inside information about it, we may wonder. He is also teaching the survivor how to survive, so he functions as a sort of mentor-like figure in the narrative. But as soon as he starts to talk about reptilians infiltrating the royal family, we are to begin to suspect that his paranoia was just like that broken watch that is eventually right.

The documents we can find scattered around London build the Prepper as a frustrated man: he had the technical know-how to build the Prepper Pad and the military training to survive, but his theories were constantly dismissed as crazy talk. His belief made him a pariah, damaging his career and relationships.

The way he talks about the plague, then, becomes revealing. In the game’s first hours, we come across a doctor who speaks of a cure, but the Prepper is quick to dismiss it as a fairy tale that should not be pursued. His position can come across as fatalism at first, since he vehemently defends that there’s no salvation for anyone. But the more we hear the Prepper speak, the more his words hint that his position may be about denial: he not only dismisses the cure as preposterous, but the very notion of it also makes him angry. Maybe he rejects the possibility of a cure so strongly because he doesn’t want one: the existence of the plague not only proves him right but also grants him a position of power – he functioned as a mentor-like figure to the survivor, after all.

The protagonist is, however, a silent one, which means that character interaction is always one-sided, with the Prepper shouting things at us and no response coming out of the survivor we control. It’s an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of one of the game’s main design choices: death is permanent here. When our survivor perishes, we just start controlling another one back at the safe house – and they come with a new name, gender, and profession.

Due to its theme, ZombiU manages to offer a perfect explanation for the Soulslike trope of requiring us to retrace our steps back to where we died to recover our lost items. The previous survivor has, of course, become a zombie and must be properly dispatched before we can retrieve our weapons, items, and ammo. Consequently, there’s always a tension when we are facing the monstrous versions of our past selves: the obvious tension of dying again and losing all the items, but also the more abstract tension of wondering if the current survivor – the character we are inhabiting– will eventually meet the same fate. In other words, when we face the zombie survivor, we may be facing our future.

The areas we traverse have shortcuts, usually a door we can unlock/unbar or ladders we can knock down, which makes coming back to the scene of the crime less of a chore. Defeated Zombies remain defeated too, easing the pain and frustration of having to backtrack with almost no means of self-defense. Whatever killed us there still remains, however, and now with the zombie survivor alongside it to further complicate things.

ZombiU is not an easy game. We can even die in the intro while running away from the initial zombies. And the first person the Prepper wants us to meet is a previous survivor who refused his help – and is now a zombie stuck on a door. It’s a great scene because it functions as a tutorial – we are to kill a zombie that can’t defend itself – but also as a warning, as the Prepper is showing us the consequence of not obeying his commands.

The game’s greatest triumph is that it manages to make the zombies a deadly enemy. ZombiU builds horror through a sense of vulnerability. It gives us a single melee weapon – a cricket bat because London – and makes the animation slow and the damage unpredictable. We don’t know if a zombie will require two or eight swings with the bat to die: encounters become suspenseful because we can’t predict if we will be able to kill a zombie before the other – which is approaching rapidly – can reach us.

One lonely zombie is easy to deal with using the cricket bat – if we don’t time our swings wrong, that is – but put just one more zombie in the room and suddenly the survivor is in mortal danger. Each slow swing with the bat leaves the character vulnerable to surrounding enemies and if a zombie manages to get too close, they can stop attacking and go for a grab, biting the “survivor” and turning them into a zombie with just one hit.

The sound design adds to the tension. Each hit with the bat sounds brutal, as if we were crushing the head of the zombie hit by hit, and the survivor usually screams in anger or frustration during the swings, making them more impactful – playing with a new survivor also means that we are not used to the sound of their screams, so we can confuse them with those of an approaching zombie, which further adds to the tension. The soundtrack, which is usually eerie, also kicks it up a notch during a fight, building up a sense of danger and violence.

There’s not just the cricket bat in the game, however. The survivor also has access to grenades, flares, and guns, but ammo is a scarce resource. Therefore, we are encouraged to only spend it when surrounded, facing a horde, or when coming across some – thankfully rare – special zombies that can damage the survivor from afar. If we spend ammo carelessly, we may end up helpless in a tough situation, but at the same time, not spending it may lead to the survivor’s death – and we can always die to the resulting zombie and lose that precious ammo forever.

The characters we control are common folk, they are engineers, analysts, and taxi drivers. The game introduces them with their profession precisely to mark this trait: they are not proficient with weapons or action heroes. ZombiU isn’t like the modern Resident Evils of its time, it’s not an action game, but a survival horror: it’s about making us feel vulnerable rather than powerful. It creates tension by forcing the survivor to live up to their moniker.

The zombies are carefully positioned in the levels to ambush us, lurking around corners, posing as corpses to loot, waiting hidden inside a dense fog or under the intense rain of certain areas. The levels are built with this in mind, often looking for ways to conceal a zombie from us: the cold temperature of the meat locker of a supermarket, for example, produces a thick mist that covers all the bodies on the ground – and some may be moving towards the survivor.

The game is in the first person, limiting our field of view: in the third person, we would have been able to spot enemies coming from all sides, but not here. For some unknown reason, it’s always nighttime when the survivor goes to explore an area, which means darkness often conceals enemies as well.

The survivor always carries a small flashlight with them, but it can run out of battery after a while, maybe leaving us in the dark during an intense encounter, having us swing the cricket bat blindly in the dark. Its battery recharges automatically when it’s not being used, so we have to turn the flashlight off from time to time and deal with a more limited vision of our surroundings. Sometimes, we have to explore places with no natural light, such as catacombs or basements, which means that turning off the light leaves us in complete darkness.

Add a grain filter that muds our view, a low depth of field, and textures fitting for a Wii U launch title, and you have an esthetic that – although not technically impressive – works wonders in a survival horror game, creating tension by making it difficult for us to properly identify what lies ahead. It conceals the zombies and builds up suspense.

As a consequence, the minimap on the Wii U’s gamepad becomes a crucial tool for survival. By pressing a button in the touch screen, we can activate a radar that displays everything that’s moving in the vicinity as red dots, much like the radar in Aliens. This means that the game is constantly and organically generating that typical moment of horror movies where a character hears a noise coming from the next room, approaches it carefully, and then discovers… that it was just a rat.

The use of the gamepad is crucial to ZombiU because it adds another important layer of vulnerability. The minimap with the radar is not displayed on the TV screen, so just like the actual character in the game we have to divert our eyes to look down at it, leaving us open to unfortunate surprises. When we hear the “blip” on the gamepad warning us of something moving nearby, we have to look down to see if the zombie (if it is indeed a zombie and not just a crow) is coming from behind us or from the sides – and the monster can get closer to us in the meantime. If this information had been placed on the TV screen, we would have had immediate access to it and the game would have missed a chance to build up suspense. In other words, the Wii U’s gamepad delays access to important information, creating a new layer of vulnerability.

ZombiU actually doubles down on this design and puts a bunch of actions on the gamepad. Inventory management, lockpicking, unbarring doors, unlocking shortcuts, they all require the player to look down and interact with the gamepad, leaving us exposed in the process. And there are scripted events linked to these moments, with zombies only appearing after we started lockpicking a door.

If someone were to put ZombiU into a more powerful console, with better textures and lighting effects, longer depth of field, and a minimap present on the screen at all times, they would be removing the very elements that make the game work as a horror experience. ZombiU is about suspense and vulnerability, it’s about the nerve-wracking tension of not knowing what’s ahead and feeling powerless when we finally find out.

The game’s most memorable level, the Nursery, is built on this very idea. This level suddenly removes one of the most important tools at our disposal and traps the survivor in a pitch-black basement, while introducing a new type of enemy and preparing some intense jump scares – they work here precisely because they are a rare sight in the game, so we are never trained to expect them.

ZombiU knows the value of moments of silence. In most levels, there are long stretches where there are no zombies in sight. But we still keep checking every corner for ambushes and hitting each corpse on the ground with the bat to see if they fall down or scream back. Suspense can only be built when this silence is stretched, creating doubt in our minds: every corner without a zombie makes us apprehensive, believing that the next one will hold the climactic moment.

There are also some interesting moments in the level design that play with our curiosity. While exploring Buckingham Palace, we can come across a locked door that needs a 4-number password to open. Right next to it, however, there are three numbers written in blood on the wall, with a winding line going down after the last digit, indicating the fate of the person who was writing the answer. We can dismiss it as typical video game design and try our luck guessing the fourth number or… treat it as a warning about the dangers of attempting to crack it.

Of course, the game is not without its faults. It often fails at contextualizing the presence of new survivors in the story, with some bits of dialogue treating the current one as if they were the same person from the start. The ending is also too rushed, leaving the Prepper’s storyline without a proper, climactic resolution. It’s rare, but sometimes the zombies can also get stuck behind a wall or fall through the floor, which is a problem when the zombie in question is the previous survivor, making us lose our items.

Finally, ZombiU also comes with a great local multiplayer mode that turns it into a proper action game: one player positions zombies on the map with the gamepad (using the touch screen) while the other plays on the TV, trying to survive and shoot them all down.

ZombiU is an excellent survival horror game that knows full well how to take advantage of the Wii U’s often underutilized controller to build a memorable survival horror experience.

August 07, 2022.