A Tactical Stealth Zombie Strategy Puzzle FPS-RPG

The setup: You are part of a First-Response Anti-Undead Tactical force (it's FRAUT with danger, geddit?). You have a suit that seals your delicious brain-smells in, keeping you more-or-less invisible to zombies. A large-scale zombie breakout occurs in a major city, as terrorists have set off a Zombomb. You (and a bunch of other gits in anti-zombie-suits) are air-dropped into that city.

The gameplay: Now, you can wander around all you want without gaining the attention of the zombies. That is, unless you whack one of them. Then that one zombie will flail around in defense of itself. Such flailings could damage your suit. Damage to your suit means you'll start attracting zombies. More zombies leads to more suit damage leads to more zombies leads to death, well, unless you can mend it in time. There are repair kits about, ranging from Janitor Ed's duct tape to a toolbox with spare parts dropped by the same choppers that dropped off your team.

But here's the kicker. You're not here to slay hordes of zombies or even destroy the evil MacGuffin that's making all the zombies. You're here to corral the living populace to easily-defendable positions within your assigned quadrant of the city until such time that the army can arrive. (The fact that you can eventually find and destroy the MacGuffin is not part of your original strategy). But that's not easy. You got to convince terrified mothers holed up in barricaded closets to follow you, talk down crazy gunshop owners from forming up militias, deal with looters, and prevent people from escaping the quarantine; either through diplomacy or violence.

This leads us to the bones of the game: Escort Survivor to Safe Point. Example: You go into an office building and find a guy named Guy calling for help over the PA system. This building has a fair smattering of brainchompers in it, but they don't give a shit about you. You find him in a women's bathroom with a couch against the door. As you lead him to your current base of operations in a nearby library, the zombies will respond to Guy and lurch after him. Your task is to delay or halt all of these zombies. You have limited ammo, and melee runs the risk of ripping your suit. But, you can shape your escape path: block out a path from the bathroom to the elevators using chairs, tables, other zombies, and so on.

Some barriers may only hold back zombies for a short while, but fortunately (as opposed to SOME escort missions I could think of) survivors can run, sometimes faster than you can. They'll tend to follow you, unless they're particularly jittery, in which case they might run off the path you've set up. This brings us to the taser, and why you have one in a zombie outbreak. If little Tommy Pisspants is about to run straight into a zombie ambush (a truly pathetic end), you can shock the kid and drag him to the elevator. However, tasered folk won't trust you as much and will be more prone to leaving their safe point or causing a riot. You can also shoot survivors, but not only do they become zombies, if anyone else sees you doing it your trust level with them will drop sharply. That said, people with low trust levels may still do what you want because they're afraid you'll shoot them next.

Sometimes you'll meet up with tougher survivors, or police officers, or crazy gunshop owners. You can assign them to watch over a safehouse, or to patrol an area for survivors, or you can bring them along with you to clear the way for any survivors that you find.

The safehouses have a varying degrees of inherent security and an upgradeable degree of fortification. The more survivors at a safehouse, the more likely zombies are going to siege it. Ideally you should spread out your safehouses around the city, though spreading it too thin is just as bad. There is a similar system for vehicles (no weapons save for the ones you bring with you). You can, should you choose to, go about the city with a tricked-out armored hot dog cart.

Zombies are traditional slow-but-steadies. There are no superzombies. There are no evil scientists out to stop you. Maybe you'll meet some of the terrorists that were responsible for the outbreak who were caught in the quarantine, but there will not be dozens of them. The city will not be a grungy post-apocalyptic horror. It'll be gory in patches, but the power will still be on and you can wash your bloody hands in most any sink you stumble across. Cars will not be sitting in the streets on fire, though some may be crashed into things (and if they aren't, they can be). You can hear regular radio chatter from your fellow FRAUTers about how they're doing, very little of which will involve screaming and begging for backup.

The major objectives revolve around crowd control, defensible positions, and public opinion. The gamut of the game would range from Shoot All The Survivors, Let The Army Sort It Out; to Save Everyone I Find, Seek Out The Infection Vector; to I Am The King Of Zombietown, Pay Me Tribute Or Die.


There, it's out of my fucking head now.