There are so many zombie games. Sometimes they seem endless. You can decide if there is a pun intended or not. Regardless, most zombie games share one thing in common.
They are real-time, action-oriented games that depend on quick reactions and feature extremely linear plots that require dramatic, multi-stage boss fights. But not Dead State. Here we have an old-school PC RPG, also known as a CRPG, built on turn-based mechanics very similar to those of the Shadowrun games from the mid-2010s.
Dead State is incredibly difficult. It’s also not an easy game to learn. But if you’ve ever wanted a game that takes a deep dive into zombie survival horror that requires you to manage resources, maintain a shelter, make extremely hard choices, and offer extremely challenging combat but presented in a turn-based format, Dead State is your game.
Release, Availability, Ease of Access
Dead State seems to be exclusively available on Steam. Its official title is Dead State: Reanimated. The “Reanimated” addition refers to the May 2015 update, which added large amounts of depth and quality-of-life improvements. It is currently priced at 19.99 at the time of writing.
The game was developed by DoubleBear Productions and Iron Tower Studio. It was originally released in December 2014, with the Reanimated update going live in May of 2015.
Because this is a PC game, it is important to talk about hardware requirements and ease of access. Thankfully for most PC gamers, Dead State is not a demanding piece of software. It’s an independent game that only requires 2 gigs of RAM and 3 gigs of hard drive space.
It does ask for a minimum 1.7 GHz processor and a minimum of either an Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT or an ATI Radeon HD 7290 (512mb) or better. The game also requires Windows.
I’ve ran the game both on Windows 10 and Windows 11 desktop PC’s without issue. It didn’t require any troubleshooting for me to install and launch the game. Everything was installed the way it should be, and the setup process was entirely without issue for me. The only thing I have noticed that could present a problem is that the game seems to run significantly better on my desktop PC’s than any of my laptops.
Menus and text are much harder to see on a laptop. And finding the right aspect and display ratios was not entirely easy. And the overall performance on my laptops was somewhat laggy and dragging, regardless of Windows 10 or 11.
Some desktop-focused gamers may say that such a thing is a given. But if you are a laptop-only PC gamer and aren’t comfortable with tinkering with settings and workarounds for display size and overall game performance, that is certainly all worth keeping in mind.
Old School CRPG Zombie Horror Divinity
It’s impossible to ignore Dead State’s similarities to Baldur’s Gate 1. This feels somewhat intentional. The game’s intro begins with a Frederich Nietzsche quote, calling to mind the original Baldur’s Gate intro quoting Nietzsche before the initial Candle’s Keep scene.
While Dead State does make use of more modern gaming mechanics and is itself turn-based, where Baldur’s Gate 1 is not, graphically and systematically, the two games have much in common. Players will see the characters in their parties pictured in a vertical line, much like in Baldur’s Gate.
The mouse cursor icon also looks rather similar between the two games. The character sheets and inventory menus are also set up in a format comparable to genre classics. This all helps frame Dead State as a deep cut of the CRPG revival seen during the mid 2010’s. It’s a great fit alongside Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera and many others.
And Dead State truly has so much of what makes an old-school CRPG so appealing. Your main character is usually given plenty of dialog options.
This allows you to fully immerse yourself in your character and lead your party as either a heartless, utilitarian despot who enforces strict submission to your authority or an empathetic, people-first matriarch who wants to see people happy, safe, and protected, no matter the cost. Or anything in between. Even from the very beginning, the first dialog options make it clear that the player can choose to be heterosexual or gay.
They can also choose to be from Texas or just as easily despise the state in which they find themselves. Dialog is important throughout the game. The more you build up your character’s interpersonal stats, the better they are able to rally the members of their party and talk their way out of dangerous situations.
Player’s success in navigating combat absolutely depends on equipping each character with the right gear for the right situation. It equally requires players to develop a complete understanding of the game’s combat mechanics.
And if any character dies besides the player’s character, the game continues. There are certain objectives that are best fulfilled throughout the game, but how one approaches them is ultimately up to the player. Dead State gives you the freedom and depth that CRPG’s are known for.
The character creation suite is robust. Perhaps it is not quite as deep as Pillars of Eternity 1. But this zombie survival RPG does boast an intricate system that allows players to create a character they’ll feel comfortable playing. The two main stat categories players must invest their XP in are Stats and Skills. The former consisting of strength, agility, vigor and perception.
The latter includes melee, ranged, leadership, negotiation, medical, science, survival, and mechanical. The skills branch also offers specializations after leveling up a skill 3 times.
This is an Extremely Difficult Game
There’s no denying it. Dead State is extremely difficult, even on the easiest settings. But even in saying that, the game does make itself accessible to different kinds of players.
Right off the bat, players are allowed to choose whether or not they want their characters to be at risk for infection if bitten. If this is enabled, players will have 3 days to find antibiotics for the character in question. If not, the character becomes a zombie.
I highly recommend playing the game once through with this option turned off. Players need every character they can get in their party to successfully navigate this game. And antibiotics are few and far between. And combat is rough. Very rough. Which is to say the combat in Dead State is extremely difficult. You will get bitten. Regularly. And there is enough to do as it is without having to find what little medicine might be scattered around the map.
It is certainly appealing to try and do a playthrough where every action stands. Every bite is consequential. Every mistake carries a cost.
But actually playing the game like this is incredibly and maddeningly difficult. Some may find such an approach fun. Some might be turned off completely. I suggest playing the game through first with infection options turned off. Then, after players become fully familiar with all of the game’s mechanics, a second playthrough with infection turned on is ideal.
There is a lot to Dead State. Item management, party management, base building and maintenance, exploration, combat, and character interaction are all essential to have a successful go at this game.
There is no perfect character build. You need high leadership and negotiation abilities to keep your party from mutiny. You need characters who excel at ranged and melee combat to keep people alive on your missions. And you need characters who have high engineering abilities to both maintain and repair your base as well as build and develop new additions to make your base even more secure and comfortable.
This depth makes Dead State very replayable. There are multiple decisions that change the game throughout, as well as so many ways to build your character and party that playing the game through several times stays consistently enjoyable and interesting.
Is there A Story?
The game’s storyline is simple enough. There is a pandemic. Over the period of about a week a bad situation turns into an apocalypse.
Your character is on a passenger airline just before things collapse. An infected person gets on board right before they turn into a zombie. And when they do, the ensuing chaos causes the plane to crash. The player survives and is saved from the wreckage by a local police officer.
The player then wakes up and finds themselves in an abandoned high school with a few other survivors. And just like that, you are fighting for your group’s survival in the middle of small-town central Texas. The player is instantly in the middle of several interpersonal conflicts.
There isn’t enough food. A mother and daughter each don’t want the other to go out into the field. One of the survivor’s is too traumatized to speak, let alone work. Another is sick and needs extra care for several days before they may or may not recover. There are holes in the fence protecting the school that need to be repaired as quickly as possible. And there are zombies everywhere.
The first few excursions into the world are suggested to the player by other party members. After that, exploration is required.
Depending on how the game goes and who lives or dies, you might have the opportunity to decrypt data in a fairly easy password-guessing minigame. Players will find items like laptops and phones out in the world. And if they engage with this part of the game, they can learn more and more about what is going on in the world.
As well as gradually finding messages written by a mysterious person or persons who seem to know quite a lot about what is going on, very cryptically.
The more players explore, the more they will likely find other survivors they can recruit to their group. The more people in your group, the more you can accomplish around your base. But the more people you recruit, the more resources you consume and the more resources you require.
And the game is fair. Eventually, you may gain the ability to send characters out on fishing trips. You might also gain a car you can travel in. Or horses. This is not a short game. And there are a lot of things that may or may not happen depending on how long certain characters survive and what the player does and does not accomplish.
Players who fully engage with the game spend about 50-60 hours on average in a single full playthrough.
Dead State might not exactly offer characters like Clementine, Lee, and AJ from the iconic Walking Dead adventure series. But the story is compelling enough. The characters that start off your party are interesting, albeit what one might expect at the beginning of a zombie apocalypse.
They have some depth and background that allow you to grow attached if you so choose. And there are more characters to meet throughout the game that allow the dynamics of your party to develop based on who you recruit and who might not get along with whom, and so on and so forth.
A Typical Gaming Session in Dead State
A large part of the game involves going out to different locations and hunting for supplies or to achieve other objectives. While your characters are out in the field, you will attempt to find a variety of items. Weapons, spare parts to use for base repairs and upgrades, ammo, food, gasoline and medical supplies among other things.
Characters will also let you know about certain types of items that they want for personal reasons. Like chocolate, batteries for a CD player, things like that. If you are able to find these items out in the world and then give them to the characters that desire them, your characters’ bond will grow considerably.
Those characters will then back your character more fervently as the leader of the group and morale will start to increase. This is generally helpful if only because the last thing you want is for morale to plummet.
The controls in the game are fairly straightforward. They are especially familiar to players with experience in the Shadowrun series from the 2010’s.
AP is required for movement and actions in combat. There is no Overwatch. Each weapon has a few different types of attacks. Reloading guns costs AP. There are bleeding and disorientation statuses that can be inflicted on both your party and human enemies.
Zombies will either try to swipe at you, try to bite your wrist, or knock you down and then feast upon you. When downed, characters have the chance to kick out of a zombie tackle at the beginning of said character’s turn. Other characters can also attack a zombie mounted on a party member. If they successfully kill said zombie, the party member will no longer be mounted.
There is also a bleeding-out phase that occurs between knockout and character death. Once a character’s HP has reached zero, they become knocked out. And they will then have a new HP count that decreases each time their turn comes up.
Other characters will have the chance to heal the knocked-out character, stabilizing them and preventing them from actually dying. If the character’s HP count reaches zero after being knocked out, they are fully dead and will soon become a zombie. This applies to both player and non-playable human characters alike.
This highlights some of what makes Dead State interesting. When confronted by a large group of human enemies, if players manage to kill one or two of their enemies and allow them to turn into zombies, quite a bit of chaos can ensue rather quickly.
If enough zombies start attacking your human enemies, it can allow you to take advantage of the mayhem, loot items, and run away without actually having to fight much yourself.
Players also have to keep in mind how much noise they are making as they walk and run around each level. Running might help get away from zombies, but it will also make more noise, potentially attracting more zombies or other human enemies.
Players also might prefer to use guns instead of melee weapons since they are able to fight at a distance and cause more damage. But the sound of shooting makes a lot of noise and thus will attract more enemies, human and zombies alike. However, there is generally a fixed number of enemies in each level.
So if you do prefer a gun-focused party, as long as you are able to kill every enemy in an area, there is no risk of more enemies spawning due to heavy noise levels.
Also, while out in the field, characters are only able to carry a certain number of items depending on their strength statistic. So a certain amount of discretion is needed when deciding what to pick up and carry back to base and what to leave behind.
Players might choose to divide their missions between scouting and scavenging. One day, a party focused on combat can go into an area and kill whatever zombies and human enemies they find.
Next, a different group can be assigned to go and pick up whatever items are left behind. But such a strategy also means that more food is going to be consumed and more wear and tear will build up on your base with fewer parts and food coming in day to day. There is a lot to balance and consider in this game.
A typical in-game day will consist of choosing what party members you want to go out into the field with you and then assigning those who stay behind tasks to accomplish around your shelter.
This includes repairing the fence that guards your base, fixing up an old well to get a source of fresh drinking water, and things like that. Throughout the game, there will be multiple ways to improve your base and the morale of your party. And while at first the map seems spare with only a few known locations to visit, there really is a plethora of places to explore in the game.
And this leads to one thing that might make the game more challenging than it needs to be. There is some direction in the game. The game makes it somewhat obvious what to do and how to accomplish it right when you first begin.
But the depth of the game requires a certain amount of trial and error to really suss out what all one is able and needs to accomplish.
For example, the player can click anywhere on the map to attempt to explore and find a new location. After a few days, it becomes essential to pick a day to randomly head west or south and see what comes up. The game doesn’t explicitly tell you this, however. And with such a high degree of difficulty, one bad decision or missed opportunity can be catastrophic.
So make sure to create plenty of well-labeled saves that allow you to return to a previous location in case you make a mistake as you are learning the game.
Another thing that detracts from the game is a somewhat underdeveloped morality system. Occasionally, your party will stumble across human characters that are considered innocent. If you kill them, your party’s morale plummets. But there really isn’t a consistent signifier of this innocent status.
You will only really be able to tell after you’ve killed an innocent person because of your party members’ verbal reactions.
They will say how horrible they feel and that they regret doing what they just did. Completely after the fact. And because morale is so incredibly important, this creates unnecessary stress for the player.
For example, early in the game, players will find a human campsite they can visit. If you encounter the people who live there, they will tell you to leave. If you do not immediately do so, they will attack your party.
And even if they attack first, killing one of them, let alone all of them, will result in a massive morale decline due to their entire group being considered innocent.
However, if you enter into combat with them and then avoid killing them, only to run around the map and loot their items, that is considered completely fine. You get all the morale bonuses of the items they have and not a single penalty for stealing. Wouldn’t their chances of survival be completely ruined due to your actions? Wouldn’t that also be considered effectively killing innocent people? Not according to Dead State’s morality system.
It would make more sense if players were able to enter into dialog with groups like this and invite them back to join your shelter.
There should be a way to incorporate NPC’s into your base’s population. They could be rendered as available only for tasks around your base, reducing the amount of time needed to complete repairs or build new add-ons. Or they could be made available for combat, with built-in inventories that are not editable, allowing you to better protect the playable characters whose survival impacts the story of the game.
Regardless, the morality system in Dead State can negatively impact the game in multiple ways across several stages of play.
The game would also benefit from notifications that tell the player they are able to level up a character’s stats. As it is, players have to consistently check their character sheets to see what XP they have earned and if they are able to level up anything.
If players forget to check on this regularly, the game can become much harder much more quickly as characters become under-qualified for the combat situations they find themselves in. Morale can also decline unnecessarily because players do not realize they are able to level up their negotiation and leadership skills.
Excellent Sound, Good Indie visuals
The soundtrack is spare but strangely exciting. The slow, lyrical piano ballads sprinkled throughout the game recall other independent PC games from the mid-2010’s, like Samaritan’s Paradox.
The battle music is fairly straightforward and is what you might expect from a survival horror RPG. But the quiet moments this game offers between missions are where Lena Raine’s soundtrack really becomes something special.
The quiet moments between missions are where the game shines in more ways than one. There is something about being fortified within an abandoned school that can really help capture the player’s imagination.
You have two floors and a basement to set yourselves up in. It’s hard to ignore the romanticism present in having an abandoned school all to yourselves. Even if it is during a zombie apocalypse.
The game’s graphics also play into this romanticism. Even though this is an indie game with thoroughly indie graphics, there are certain things the visuals do to really create some interesting emotional depth.
The quality of sunlight that comes in during the afternoons as you explore the school is especially interesting. It might call to mind the feeling of being inside a school building as an actual student, dreaming of getting out of class once the clock finally reaches the end of the day.
The game’s romantic music and visuals juxtapose feelings like this with the realities of a zombie apocalypse quite well, creating a rather interesting emotional experience.
The portraits of characters are also well drawn. And the dialog is consistently emotionally impactful. Even killing your enemies becomes emotionally heavy as they say things like, “I don’t want to die,” and, “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
The game constantly makes you think about your actions. And it consistently makes you consider other people and their needs, wants, hopes, and goals. This is something a lot of action-oriented games like Resident Evil are often not able to accomplish.
Levels are also predictably sprinkled with details that will challenge players’ emotions. Cribs stained with blood, teddy bears left in the corner of a disheveled room, etc etc.
Some might argue that details like these are cheap emotional tricks that ultimately boil down to low-quality shock value. I tend to agree with this. But it is also fair to say that such details would absolutely be present in a real zombie crisis and that including them lends to realism and increased emotional impact.
Dead State includes these elements sparingly and generally tastefully. Overall, the game can be considered brutal. It is not lighthearted in the slightest.
Final Thoughts
I think Dead State ultimately shines in two distinct ways. Most zombie games are so action- and performance-oriented that they completely take the psychology and plot immersion away from the player.
Everything in games like Dead Rising or Dying Light boils down to pressing the right buttons at the right times. Not to mention having plots that are fully on rails and entirely linear.
What Dead State offers is the chance to really think about your actions. Should you settle for the few items you’re able to get and go back to your base? Or should you take your chances with a group of looters and risk getting more supplies while you’re out?
The game is an excellent indie CRPG with outstanding audio and emotionally impactful dialog that remains consistent throughout the campaign. The characters are diverse and interesting, and plenty of freedom is given to players to create and play their character exactly how they want to.
And if you stay alive or at least keep reloading your saves and keep playing, Dead State is a long game with a lot of interesting storyline developments along the way.
It is extremely challenging. And there are mechanics in the game, like its morality system and even the challenges of keeping morale high day-to-day, that can make the game the opposite of fun.
But if you are a dedicated CRPG fan and especially love the era that can be called the mid-2010s CRPG revival, this game fits very well alongside Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun Returns, and other classics from all eras of computer role-playing games.
If you have a functional Windows computer bought after 2020, especially a desktop computer, this game is worth getting, especially on sale, if you are a fan of survival horror in a turn-based CRPG context. Just remember to save your game. Constantly.
