A Review: A Zombie's Life, PC 2018 (18+)

** THIS IS ABOUT AN ADULT GAME, PLEASE BE WARNED**


A Zombie's Life is an adult RPG with survival and crafting elements developed and published by Nergal, an indie game developer funded by the subscription service Patreon. The game puts you in the role of a young boy as a virus runs rampant across the city that you and your family live in. After accidentally getting infected, you grow in various ways and must find a cure and provide for your family and other female survivors that can be found around the ruined city. As the game progresses, you get to collect a harem of beautiful women and find a way to stop the virus from spreading. Gameplay is mostly standard for the RPGM engine and plays much like an early JRPG game.

I really enjoyed this game and thought that it was really good for what it was. I wanted to just love it and sing about the various aspects of my playthrough that I liked, but there is a big problem with A Zombie's Life. It was never finished. Despite the opposite being claimed by various websites and download sources, this game was never completed and, for some reason, went from being marked as 'abandoned' to being marked as 'completed', before eventually being taken down completely. When I first downloaded this game, just getting it started was a problem in and of itself and took hours of fiddling to get running. That was when I found a small community post made by Nergal himself. In it, he stated that he had burned out developing this game and that he was never going to come back to it. He even went so far as to remove it from the website that I downloaded it from and ask people to no longer play it. I think that is a terrible shame, as this game was really good, and some more polish, testing, and balancing would have made all the difference. I liked the various girls that could be 'obtained' but overall thought that past your characters immediate family, Mom, Sis, and your Aunt, they were less well written. The first three girls clearly had a lot of thought and care put into their writing and interactions with the player's character. They were robust and meaningful characters; that's at least what I thought. However, the other girls I felt were less well-rounded. They seemed to be littered with inconsistencies and all manner of broken triggers and texts. It very much seemed to me that they were all late additions to try and increase the girl count and little else. They were poorly written characters, in my opinion, as they had barely functional quest lines and endings, let alone the various other interactions that they had with the player. Whereas the other girls all seemed to make sense for the most part. There are missing dialogues and broken texts everywhere, and this becomes very apparent towards the late game, where broken text, missing speech, and broken mission or quest triggers are all too common. It can clearly be seen that Nergal reached this point and then seemed to just give up on the game and throw the end together as quickly as he could, with little care given to the quality of the end product. I also found that it was very annoying that several of the girls sex scenes were closed if you went past a certain relationship point with them. There was no way to recover all the effort that you put into them except by using the hidden cheat room. I never understood why and can only guess that there was further content planned, but it ended up getting dropped. I didn't like the small camp of boys that can be found in the south of the city. I could never understand why the various boys were all raping and beating the women that they had found. It cheapened the story, and I felt that it added nothing to the game. I believe that they were supposed to be a rival faction that the player would be forced to battle, but instead they were just a random group of vile little scumbags that were abusing the surviving women that they found. This was very clear after I killed the little sack of filth that was trying to attack Sonya in the police station. I think that was supposed to be the start of the rival war, but instead you just changed the ending slightly. Speaking of the endings, I was not impressed with two of them. They were frankly disgusting, and I felt horrid for trying them before I found the 'true ending'. The way that they were written was completely unnecessary, and I found that they were just vile. However, no matter which ending is chosen, they are all scuffed. The epilogue texts are all broken and some are missing completely; there is no closure given to certain characters, and there is no solid mention given to how the virus was stopped and the city restored. Just a load of still images and some streaming text on screen that kind of makes sense and closes some of the main plot points. It is a real shame, as the rest of this game is really fun and enjoyable; it's just that as soon as you reach the mid- to late-game, everything starts to fall apart.

Visually, this game was pretty good for a RPGM title. The environments and backgrounds were pretty cool, and I liked the feeling that the world was undergoing an apocalyptic event. The various persistent bodies and blood were a nice touch to the ambience, and I liked all the little details given to the world objects, buildings, and so on. The items, collectibles, and all the interactive areas were good-looking and made sense in the game world. The girls were all stunning, though I didn't like that they were all far too top-heavy. However, I am aware that is the style of the artist who drew the images, Siren's Domain. I would have preferred some more womanly features for the girls too. Maybe some pubic hair or slightly more robust figures, but they were still very pretty. I did notice that more than once, the girls breast sizes would fluctuate a little, but it wasn't a huge issue. The sex scenes were pretty good; I liked the posing work and thought that the girls and player characters looked nicely organic. The various plot still images looked pretty good, and I liked the ending boss battle.

Overall, this was a really good game that I think would give some professional game development companies a run for their money. However, the fact that it was never completed and is only available as a limited, buggy mess means that this game will never meet its potential. Nor will it ever meet the score that I think it could have received.




== TAGS ==

Incest – Mother-Son – Brother-Sister – Nephew-Aunt / Oral / Alcohol / Titty Fuck / 3 Way – FFM / Group Sex / Harem / Anal / Vaginal / Creampie / Graphic Violence / Rough Play / Glory Hole / Creampie / Cheating / Horror Survival / Large Penis / Large Breasts /



4/10 – Could've Been Better! 

Signed Off – Leonardo – PSJ