Surviving in Vain by Black Fly Press

Review by Ater Imber

Pretty good game, although it was pretty short. (I made it to a The End page)

The black background and choice of font made it a bit hard to read, though.

The ending was lack-luster. I made it out of the apartment to 'see the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. The End' ? A one sentence ending, really? I understand wanting to leave whatever the beautiful thing is up to the reader (or if you're supposed to assume the beautiful thing is freedom because you made it out of the apartment) but it felt like a weird place to end things.

I made it out of the apartment... now what? I think you could've continued the adventure a little longer, or heck, a lot longer, to make the game more interesting. Especially because you have even less supplies now that you've made it out (2 bullets instead of 4, loose-handled knife, etc.) so the stakes are higher/it's going to be harder to survive. At the beginning, you said there was a lot of 'zeds' circling the outside of the apartment building - shouldn't we at least of had to fight through them to truly get freedom? Or, was the 'beautiful thing' at the end supposed to be we were over-run and eaten by zombies? It's a very vague ending, and that unfortunately made it disappointing.

Also, the option to blow your brains out instead of fight - while I found it added an element of reality (it's assumed at the beginning you've been in this post apocalyptic world a while) - it seemed like a cop-out. Why would you make a game for someone to play, and then give them the option not to play it?

For games (especially survival games) to be enjoyable, there has to be some sort of stakes, some sort of hope, that makes you want to survive/get to the end. It's assumed you'd be fighting for your life in a zombie survival, but there should've been something more.