The ultimate test of your survival strategy.
Scary Zombie Shooting Game is a top-down pixel-art survival game where you build the defences, kit out your people, and leave the shooting to them. A camp of survivors holds a field, and every night the dead walk out of the trees to ruin everyone's evening.
You get the day to prepare. When night falls, your survivors pick their own targets, shoot, reload and fight up close by themselves. You can pause, or speed the night up to 4x, and hope you planned well. The fighting is automatic. The consequences are yours.
Prepare during the day
Spend your money carefully. Buy guns, ammunition, armour and supplies, repair damaged equipment, and patch up whatever the night chewed through. Decide what each survivor carries, with six equipment slots for weapons, protection and other gear. Give your best shot the good rifle, or spread the firepower around. Someone always ends up with the leftovers.
Build your defences across the field. Put up walls, stack sandbags, lay wire and make the zombies work for every bit of ground. Think about where the dead will come from, who can cover which approach, and what happens when something gets through.
Take in the strangers who turn up at the gate. More hands mean more guns pointing outwards, but also more people to equip, supply and keep alive. Some of them can even shoot.
There is never quite enough to go round. That's rather the point.
Survive the night
This is where you find out how sensible it all was.
At the front gate, your best survivor stands in chainmail with a plasma rifle and a 1980s electric carving knife, and makes it look easy. Round the back, the new hire has a cheap 9mm, a pocketful of slightly rusty bullets, and six of the dead coming through the wire.
They fire. They reload. The gun jams. You lean a little closer to the screen.
Your survivors fight for themselves, using the weapons and equipment you gave them. They'll pick targets, fire, reload and fight at close quarters when the dead get too near. You can't aim for them, and you can't make a bad plan better by being quick with the mouse.
The dead aren't all the same, either. Shamblers, runners, boomers, pukers, bloaters, climbers, diggers, breachers, elites and bosses. Runners close the distance fast. Climbers don't care how high you built the wall. Diggers don't care that you built one at all. Some enemies punish weak defences; others punish the clever ones.
Sometimes your people make it. Sometimes they make it with a bite on their arm, and you spend the whole next day watching them. A bite can infect, and the infected turn. The nice stranger you let in on day three might be the one coming back through the wire on day nine.
No two nights are quite alike. Rain, fog, snow and storms whose lightning brings down trees, usually somewhere inconvenient. Events, omens and set pieces change what comes out of the darkness. What worked yesterday might be a terrible idea tonight.
So many guns
Handguns, shotguns, hunting rifles, sniper rifles, carbines, submachine guns, regular sized machine guns, all with real calibres and ammunition types. Different weapons for different jobs, from keeping the dead at a distance to dealing with the ones already inside your defences. Then there are the experimental weapons: flamethrowers, railguns, guns which run on energy cells, and stranger things still, waiting to be discovered.
Guns wear down with use. They can jam, break and need repairs. Ammunition matters, and the survivor with the impressive rifle isn't much help when they've run out of something to put in it.
Each weapon keeps track of its kills. Put enough zombies in the ground with one and it can become something special, earning abilities alongside its growing history. That battered shotgun you nearly sold on day four might be the very thing that carries your camp through night twenty.
Every day brings something new
Traders arrive with things you can't afford. Strangers arrive with stories you can't check. Looters, supply drops, jobs on the radio and scavenging trips offer opportunities, problems and occasionally both at once.
Equipment comes in grades from poor to epic and beyond. Compare weapons, weigh up upgrades and inspect the numbers: the tooltips tell you what you're getting, so you can meticulously plan your strategy. Or just equip the most bizarre weapons and hope for the best.
Your survivors improve, too. Those who live long enough learn skills and take perks, becoming more capable with each night they survive. You decide who gets the best equipment and where to invest your resources, knowing that any of them could be gone by morning.
The game has three difficulties: Easy, Hardcore and Nightmare. In Hardcore and Nightmare, death is permanent, as you'd expect from any self-respecting roguelike. Hold out for the rescue helicopter and you might just escape, or stay behind and find out how long you really last.
Early Access
Scary Zombie Shooting Game is in Early Access. We're continuing to build on the game, with a campaign, challenges, and more features planned. The game is already fully playable, with hundreds of items and weapons, plenty of things to discover, and enough overlapping systems to make even your most carefully planned camp go horribly wrong in ways you hadn't considered.
And then there's the daily camp mode, where everyone gets the same starting seed each day. You all get the same chance to make a complete mess of things, although exactly how you manage it is entirely up to you. See how long you can survive, then find out how everyone else got on.
