I just saved a group of people who for whatever reason had been set to be hostile, and then one of my characters said the thing that people in these stories are supposed to say-while coming across as oblivious to the fact that one of those ungrateful assholes had tried to gun him down, and I’d just saved his life.īecause it fails to support the themes of these stories, State of Decay 2 ends up missing the point of its own genre even as characters occasionally mouth its commonplaces. This hadn’t been a tense deal gone wrong, or a fight over scarce resources. But I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it vested with less meaning, because the entire encounter was so nonsensical and inscrutable.
It’s a common enough sentiment in survival games, practically a requirement of the zombie apocalypse genre.
I’m asphyxiating in a cloud of procedural characters, relationships, missions, and events, dying for just one clean breath of context or meaning. What I find so striking about the contrast between these two games is that State of Decay 2 features more of everything that made the original game feel so refreshing and exciting for me… but it’s as if all those elements have reached toxic levels in the game’s atmosphere. Their exchanges fit together as poorly as pieces from two entirely different puzzles, revealing just how atomized these procedural personalities really are. Even my two original characters, an estranged brother and sister, have not had one real conversation since the scripted tutorial concluded. That’s when they talk at all, besides making observations about a new mission prompt, or to remark on the state of the camp. They talk past each other in meandering anecdotes that lead nowhere, and receive non-committal replies in return. Several hours into State of Decay 2, I don’t feel anything like the same connection with the game’s characters… or even much confidence that they are characters.
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