Nancy Becker was a burger flipper. She woke up in an empty house with nothing but a spatula and two tins of corned beef in the cupboards. There were snarling zombies outside, a cooking show blasting from the TV, and a priest giving a sermon on the radio while being eaten alive by zombies. It’s June 21, 2025, in rural Kentucky. This is the frame, the canvas, the playing field, that Project Zomboid gives you. The rest is entirely up to you. Whether you play Indie Stone’s zombie apocalypse simulator alone, on an RP server, or with your friends, there is nothing like Project Zomboid’s brilliant organic storytelling.
Nancy made a dash outside the house with her spatula. She bonked a couple of zombies over the head, and got a feel for it. Then she smashed her next-door neighbour’s window and started pilfering the goods from their cupboards. It’s the apocalypse and everyone is a zombie, so you get to do whatever the hell you want. Thankfully, her neighbours had a crowbar upstairs and some snazzy leather gloves, so she grabbed both of them. She found a child’s satchel in the bedroom and, although it makes her feel pretty morbid, she slung it over her back.
RELATED:Vampire Survivors DLC, Tides Of The Foscari, Is Just More Of The Same
Then the scale of the event dawns on her. Everyone in Knox County, Kentucky, is a zombie. There are no other survivors (not yet, the game hasn’t added NPCs - although that is coming in a future update) which means survival is entirely on her shoulders. The water and power will eventually turn off, and the copious supplies of fresh goods will rot in fridges and freezers. Even the buckets of canned foods will run out eventually. But, the detailed simulation of Indie Stone’s labor of love provides everything you need to survive: you can find generators to power your home, steal industrial cookers and freezers, hotwire cars, replace their engines, decorate your home with anything you can pick up, and find hordes of guns inside police stations and military outposts.
And there you’ll be, three weeks into the apocalypse, just getting set up, most of the zombies nearby are dead and rotting in the street, the weather begins to turn, you feel confident - and there, in the shadows, lurking in a bush, or behind a door, is a single lonely zombie that ends your run with one well-timed bite to the neck. It’s over. Your life is over. It takes two or three days to turn into a zombie so Nancy heads home and has a good cry, drinks a bottle of bourbon, then takes to the street with a shotgun and a rucksack full of shells to blast as many zombies to pieces as she can before she eventually succumbs to the infection in the comfort of her apocalypse paradise.
But the story doesn’t end there. Nancy will wander the world as a zombie for the rest of time, or at least until your next character arrives on the scene and smashes her zombie brain in to acquire the keys to her fancy Dodge Ram and the rest of those shotgun shells. Each instance of Project Zomboid will keep running, which means you can have as many characters as you like playing in the world, one after another, until every zombie in Knox County is just a version of your previous self. There’s Drew the Police Officer who wakes up in the station, or Kelly the Lumberjack who wakes up in a woodland cabin with a hefty axe and the keys for a sweet truck outside.
You are expected to die in Project Zomboid. The game even begins with the succinct message: “This is how you died.” You are living the story of a survivor in the apocalypse, and no other game has managed to do what Project Zomboid does. Even my most successful characters have been lured into a false sense of security. One of them ate a mushroom they found on a foraging run and died in twisting agony in the bathroom. One of my very early characters apparently completely forgot that placing metal in a microwave will cause a massive fire, so they burned to death surrounded by enough supplies to keep them alive for forty years. It’s a pretty accurate representation of my own apocalypse survival skills—I wouldn’t last eight hours.
