The Adventures of Zomboy review

• Reviews by Beau
• Published:

Given new life in a commercial update, this pretty but short and basic adventure hasn't grown much since its free Flash predecessor

As The Adventures of Zomboy begins, you are craving brains so badly that nothing else matters until you get some. Thankfully, there’s an aluminum can of brains near your bed and a can opener in your RV. It’s a good thing, too, as Zomboy is a pacifist zombie who’s just trying to figure himself out and what the future holds. Sadly, neither of these things occurred in the 53 minutes it took me to click through this pocket-sized adventure.

Arctic Arcade is known for their Flash games, and indeed this is more or less an upgraded version for Steam of their point-and-click freeware game (of the same name) released in 2012. I haven’t played the original version, but apparently the enhanced commercial edition includes new graphics, scenes, clickable items, and is easier to play. I can certainly testify that the game is easy and painless.

After getting full on the can of brains, Zomboy realizes he has no idea who he is or what’s going on in the world. Leaving the RV, you can talk to a still-living girl (identified only as “girl”) who is missing the key to her own family’s motorhome and is hoping you can find it. And so begins a series of simplistic fetch quests that eventually lead to Zomboy collecting pieces of a map that shows him how to get out of this campsite.

There are only five screens to walk through, including the inside of two RVs and a cafe that is somehow still serving coffee (and only coffee, it seems). You’ll meet a half-dozen human characters who have two to three lines each, none of which reveal a hint of personality. Eventually the girl will (re)teach you how to read, which allows you to learn about how zombies came to be. The lore is fairly brief, however; all we get are some newspaper articles about science experiments gone wrong. We don’t even discover why brains started being manufactured in cans for public consumption so humans and zombies could peaceably co-exist. Zomboy will learn how he came to be a zombie, though we find out very little about his past life.

The Adventures of Zomboy

Genre:	Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Monsters, Post-apocalyptic
Perspective:	Third-Person
Gameplay:	Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low
Graphic Style:	Cartoon

As limited as the environments are, visually the game is pretty, using watercolor (relying heavily on orange and beige) to effectively portray the (presumably) post-apocalyptic setting. It’s pretty easy to tell what everything is, and the cursor changes from a pair of footprints to a hand when you hover over something you can interact with. There is minimal animation apart from Zomboy walking, and one brief cutscene halfway through involving two of the characters that is a bit out of nowhere and creates a potential conflict that is never addressed again. Outside of a few sound effects there is not much to listen to either, music or otherwise. All dialogue is written.

The puzzles here are simple, and even if you get stuck, there’s only so many things you can click on. A couple of times you need to combine things in your inventory, but otherwise the puzzles consist of finding items. I only solved one particularly unintuitive puzzle involving retrieving the girl’s key purely by spamming hotspots on the screen to find where it might be hidden. I had no idea what item to look for, and when I found it, it was not in a place I’d expect it anyhow. Honestly, I would have finished the game in about forty minutes but finding all of the map pieces is a chore; they’re mostly “behind” other objects for no real reason, so the only way to find them is just by clicking everywhere and hoping you get lucky.

The ending also fails to be satisfying. All you do is leave the area, and there’s a brief denouement where Zomboy wonders what the future holds. There was a planned sequel over ten years ago that never came to fruition, though it does look like the developer is hoping to continue this story soon, so perhaps we may one day find out.

Final Verdict

It’s often the case that short games make up for their brevity by punching up the charm or humor, but there seems to be little effort made here in either regard. Almost every comment people (including Zomboy) make is perfunctory, and outside of some mildly amusing pamphlets in the cafe, the zombie atmosphere is fairly derivative. While this all may be well and good for a free Flash game, it’s difficult to recommend anyone pony up even the small price for The Adventures of Zomboy, unless perhaps in the hope it may yet lead to a full-fledged sequel. 

Beau played The Adventures of Zomboy on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.