Published by Gambitious Digital Entertainment
Available on PC through Steam
Suitable for ages 16+
It’s like Lemmings, but with zombies.
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Zombie Night Terror alternate box art
Oh, sorry, did you want more? Well okay, I guess I could explain to you how Lemmings works. It’s the classic puzzle game about parenthood, AKA making sure small mindless annoyances don’t murder themselves in every conceivable way. However, unlike actual child care, some people actually enjoy Lemmings.
Seeing as how I was a child that needed caring for when Lemmings came out, I was never too fond of the series. I couldn’t fathom why making every lurching pixel explode in bloody piles wasn’t winning me the game. I certainly wouldn’t call it a mature rated game based on the content, but I’m sure you have to be older than 10 to just get the basic concept of preventing murder rather than causing it. I’ve never gone back to it, so just like Lost Vikings and Road Rash, it sits in my brain as a vague familiarity rather than a niggling nostalgia.
So I wasn’t exactly begging for Zombie Night Terror, but it did have two things going for it. First, the rosy tinted glasses of fond memories wouldn’t bias me against it from the get-go. Second, this one actually wanted me to kill things. My childhood prayers have been answered! Similar to games like Infectonator, Zombie Night Terror tasks you with turning as many people as you can into the shambling dead. Certain challenges require you to keep your ravenous corpses alive (prevent them from being re-killed, more accurately?), but as long as you are turning people into zombies, you are winning.
It’s still bad for your own zombies to die, but it happens so often that you won’t blink at throwing a dozen to kill a single human.
Just as in Lemmings, a limited supply of modifiers are available to make your zombies fulfill a specific function. Some will act as staircases, others will act as walls to turn zombies around. Use these sparingly, as they generally will prevent the zombie from working as a brain devourer. You’ll frequently have to detonate your own zombies at the perfect moment to split forces, solve puzzles, and coordinate attacks. So yeah, exactly like Lemmings.
If there is any area that Zombie Night Terror differentiates from Lemmings, it’s in the tone. Rather than a legion of amicable and adorable lemmings slowly and mindlessly plodding their way towards a finish line, this is a horde of zombies slowly and mindlessly plodding their way towards a banquet of flesh. Whereas that could be done lightheartedly á la Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, Zombie Night Terror is decidedly not. The source of the zombie virus is a street drug, and most of your early victims are pimps and low level pushers who as ready to smack a hooker as a zombie. It’s a bizarrely dark backdrop given the mad scientist with a lab full of mines and laser traps. I can’t tell if the game suffers from a discordant tone, or if the developers think “smacking hoes” is legitimately humorous.
On the other hand, there is disco!
Still, none of that makes the actual game bad. The puzzles are interesting, with plenty of challenge even in the first few levels. It’s nice to play a game that actually lets me fail a few times before I can win. Figuring out the nuances didn’t feel like a chore, with enough information immediately present to make a good guess at a solution before the nuance complicates things. Even though this style of game is not my cup of tea, Zombie Night Terror is still a fun game well worth the asking price. I don’t see myself coming back to it, but if you are a huge Lemmings fan then I’m sure this will scratch that itch.
I review puzzle games with a bit of a different metric. There are those games that are so frustrating that I can’t bother playing, but those are few and far between. For most, I will get through some of the levels, and and up calling it quits. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad game, but just not my thing. Then there are those that I think most people will want to play to completion, experiencing every map and the unique twist they bring. It’s only a rare few games that will pull people past that, into the realm of the challenge objectives and special conditions. I find Zombie Night Terror to be somewhere between the second and third level. I don’t really see it as a game people will want to explore every nook and cranny of. It’s certainly challenging, but there’s not enough interesting stuff to explore or reason to do so. At $13, it’s certainly worth it, but don’t expect it to resurrect your favorite dead franchise.