The Outbreak

Rack your brains before they get racked for you! Hearkening back to Choose-Your-Own-Adventure gamebooks and horror FMV titles like Night Trap, The Outbreak documents a fateful evening for a group of survivors of a sudden plague of George A. Romero-style zombies with a hunger for steaming player brains.

The player controls James, a cool-headed everyman in the midst of bloody, bloody chaos, periodically presented with breaks in the action to make choices that will influence the outcome of the plot. For example, the game opens with our group taking refuge in a house and coming to terms with Dave's zombie injury; tough-guy Seth wants to finish him off, so as to prevent Dave from being a fifth column infiltrating the house, while Kelly wants to attempt to heal his wounds. With whom shall James side?

Add the loose cannon of Alex to the mix and all the ingredients are in place for the player to play through ten decision points between twenty-one scenes, six of which are literal dead-ends and two of which are winning endings of survival, one more successful than the other.

The game is entirely deterministic, but free from moralizing; doing "the right thing" is no sure ticket for survival. Different plot branches feature parallel action -- the big zombie push into the house will occur whether you rustle up wood to barricade with or just push furniture in front of the windows, but whether Dave is still around to help you fend them off or not depends on whether or not you endorsed his euthanising as your very first choice. All the same, some scenes identical to those in parallel plot forks appear to arbitrarily feature different outcomes, demanding persistence on the part of the dedicated player who wants to see all 17 minutes of footage through rigorous playthrough.