R.I.P. Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 - May 7, 2013)

I was saddened to learn of the passing, earlier today, of film legend, Ray Harryhausen.  Ray was one of the icons of my youth and remains one of my great gaming inspirations.  Who can ever forget the awe-inspiring skeleton fight scene from Jason and the Argonauts, which is surely what many of us still imagine when we fight skeletons in our games.

 I've posted before on how influential The Golden Voyage of Sinbad was and is, and its status as probably the greatest sword & sorcery film ever made.

And, in Valley of the Gwangi, Harry showed us that dinosaurs are like peanut butter: they make everything taste better.  The only thing better than cowboys is cowboys vs. dinosaurs!

I'm happy to say that Ray Harryhausen's influence continues even today: my little girl is a fan of his work and has spent many a Saturday afternoon curled up on the couch with me watching his movies and eating popcorn; she loves the giant creatures of Mysterious Island.

A legend has passed on today, and an era in film making has passed with him.  CGI effects will never thrill me the way Ray's hand-made models do and their absence takes a bit of the shine and magic out of movies today.  Special effects are now so pervasive that they are taken for granted rather than marveled at the way we did when a gigantic horror lurched onto the scene of one of Ray's movies.  He will be greatly missed.

Session Report: Church of the Celestial Redeemer

Following the harrowing end of last session, Morgan Lynch, P.I., got himself to the hospital to recover from the gunshot wounds he received from cultists of the Ashen Brotherhood.  Randal Carter decided to further investigate the Chalice of Antioch, which had been sold to Sebastian Crawe for the princely sum of $8,000, and arranged a meeting at Crawe's estate that evening to discuss it.

Meanwhile, Devin McTavish, a small-time thief, was casing Crawe's estate when he was interrupted by a car pulling into the drive.  Hiding in the bushes, he saw several men get out and burst into the house, and then heard gunshots ring out.  Two of the intruders came out of the house, hustling a heavy-set man with a bag over his head into the car, which pealed out of the driveway and into the night.  He wasn't able to get a good look at the intruders, but he did manage to see the licence plate as the car drove away.

McTavish sneaked in through the open front door and found two dead men in the entry hall.  He was standing over them when Randal Carter arrived for his appointment a few minutes later.  They began to search the house: Randal for the Chalice of Antioch; Devin for anything that wasn't nailed down and could fit in his pockets.  The chalice was not to be found, and Randal assumed that the mysterious assailants took it with them.  They searched the bodies; Randal recognized one of them as Sebastian Shaw's driver and body guard.  The other had no identification, but had a tattoo of a burning cross on his wrist: the sign of the Ashen Brotherhood.

Randal suspected that the Ashen Brotherhood was headquartered in the burned out Church of the Celestial Redeemer, and he convinced Devin to accompany him.  Since Devin was deeply in debt to Tony Gambini for gambling losses, and was eager to hock the valuable chalice, he agreed to go along.  They arrived at the church and saw the intruder's car parked outside it.  Randal and Devin watched the church for an hour until another car pulled up and two more people got out and entered the abandoned building.  Devin broke into a nearby building and called the police to report a disturbance at the church.

They waited still longer until a police car came to investigate.  Two officers went into the church, but never came back out.  Eventually, Randal and Devin screwed up their courage and decided to investigate the church.  They crept through the front door, and into the burned out sanctuary.  Having brought no flashlight with them, they were forced make their way by the small flame of Devin's Ronson Wonderlite.

Suddenly, the floor collapsed beneath them.  Devin leaped to safety, but Randal fell through to the basement, aggravating the old war wound in his leg.  Trapped in total darkness, Randal feared to move, lest he blunder into some hazard, and called up to Devin for help.  Devin found a stairway to the basement and discovered a store room that contained several boxes of candles.  He lit two of them, and by their slightly better illumination, he found Randal waiting in the room beyond.

They began to explore the narrow, claustrophobic passageways of the old church basement, ducking to avoid low-hanging steam pipes.  The walls were punctuated with burial niches, many of them dating back to the early 1700's and all of them recently broken into.  Eventually, they came upon a small alcove containing a statue, which concealed a shaft in the floor and an old iron rung ladder descending into the darkness below.

They climbed down the ladder into a short passage that opened into a large catacomb-like chamber with a sheer drop of twenty feet into water of indeterminate depth.  Stone pillars supported a narrow stone bridge across the chamber to a passage on the far side, but the bridge had several large gaps where the stonework had crumbled.  Likewise, a ledge ran around the length of the room, but it, too, had crumbled away in places, leaving a discontinuous path.  Wooden planks spanned between the bridge and the ledge, allowing cautious passage across the gaps.  As they made their way carefully across the precarious path, Randal slipped and fell into the water far below.  The water was deep enough to break his fall, but the splash disturbed something in the water.  A gasping moan echoed through the chamber, and though he couldn't see it in the darkness, Randal could hear something splashing toward him, gibbering and gasping with urgent need.  He frantically made for the edge of the room, where Devin could see a rusted iron ladder.  Before Randal reached the ladder however, something emerged from the black water in front of him, and wrapped wet, clammy hands around his neck.  Devin fired blindly down into the pit with his .22 automatic but failed to hit anything.  Randal managed to break away from the creature grasping him, and climb up onto the ladder, shaking off the reaching hands that grasped his legs.

Once they were safely beyond the catacombs and into the passage beyond, they descended a flight of stairs into a massive chamber carved out of solid rock, supported by stone pillars that had been carved in the likeness of suckered tentacles.  The chamber, which they realized was much older than the church that had been built above it, could not have been engineered by early 18th century miners, presenting an unsettling question as to its architects.  As the chamber was far too large for them to see across by the dim light of their single remaining candle, they made their way carefully along the wall, eventually coming to a stone altar that was stained in a brown coloured crust.  The wall behind the altar was covered with a large velvet curtain.  The investigators continued on, not daring to look behind the curtain, and found another staircase leading still deeper into the earth.  As they were about to descend, they were surprised by two robed cultists coming up the stairs carrying a large bronze calyx.  They killed the cultists, took their robes and lantern and carried the calyx back down the stairs.

They made their way into what looked like a laboratory, filled with jars, vials, flasks, and various apparatuses.  Sebastian Crawe was bound to an operating table, and two withered husks in police uniforms lay upon the floor.  A robed man demanded to know why Randal and Devin were not preparing the altar for the summoning ritual, and the cult leader quickly realized that his lair had been invaded.  Crawe screamed for the two men to flee and save themselves, but instead Randal drew his pistol while Devin grabbed his shotgun that he stashed within the calyx.  Chanting a blasphemous supplication to the dark gods, the sorcerer assailed Devin's mind with monstrous visions of an alien reality that caused him to faint dead away from the shock of it.  Randal opened fire on the sorcerer with his .38 revolver, emptying its chambers, but missing the target in his panic.  The sorcerer then cast his spell again, this time subjecting Randal to the mental anguish of the Great Old Ones.  Randal's mind snapped and he flew into a homicidal rage, throwing himself desperately at his assailant.  The two struggled desperately before the sorcerer was able to strike Randal across the head with his silver-headed cane, caving in his skull.  At this moment, Devin regained consciousness, groped desperately for his fallen shotgun and blew the sorcerer's head off with a blast of 12-gauge buckshot.

Devin freed Crawe, who told him that the Ashen Brotherhood was planning to resurrect Jaques de Molay, who had been burned at the stake for witchcraft in the early 14th century, and that the cult would soon be congregating in the chamber above.  The Chalice of Antioch was instrumental in completing the resurrection of Molay's incomplete remains and that it was somewhere in the chamber above.

The two quickly went back upstairs and drew back the curtain behind the altar to reveal a life-sized bas-relief carving of an enormous winged creature with the head of an octopus crushing men beneath his feet.  They discovered the seams of a door concealed within the carving and they entered the office beyond it.  Another door in the office led to a library which contained shelves of occult books and the chalice they sought.  Ignoring the books, Devin grabbed the chalice and the two fled from the church.

Sebastian Crawe told Devin that he was an agent of the Order of the Temple: remnants of the disbanded Knights Templar who had, for centuries remained true to their vows, and fought to protect the world from the forces of darkness.  The Ashen Brotherhood, on the other hand, was founded by renegade knights who escaped the arrests in 1307 and they were attempting to resurrect their Grand Master who was condemned to die in 1314.  Crawe offered Devin money to pay off his gambling debts if he, in turn, would help to destroy the Ashen Brotherhood.  McTavish, fearing for his kneecaps, agreed.

Still Crazy After All These Years

When I started my recent Call of Cthulhu campaign I had every intention, as a good old-school curmudgeon, of sticking with my second edition rule book.  That resolution didn't last very long.  My curiosity quickly got the better of me; I cracked under the strain and bought the current sixth edition rules.

'New editions' have come to be a euphemism for 'completely unrelated game system bearing the same name' such as Wizards of the Coast regards them, or 'marketing tool to force people to buy the same game every four years' such as Games Workshop regards them.  It was refreshing and reassuring, therefore, to see that Call of Cthulhu has changed little over the past three decades and the sixth edition resembles the first edition so closely that the adventures for each are fully compatible.

The various editions of Call of Cthulhu have not changed the game so much as refined, elaborated upon, and expanded it.  It's the same game I've loved for decades, but with more spells, more weapons, and more creatures.  The skill list has been consolidated: zoology and botany have been replaced by biology, and where once there were two separate skills for reading and speaking a foreign language, you can now do both with a single skill rating.  Finally, there are now rules, skills, and equipment for running games in 1890's, 1920's, or modern settings.  So the sixth edition rules are the culmination of more than three decades of excellence in Lovecraftian role play.

It is also, unfortunately, a badly laid-out, disorganized mess.  The book's designer indulged in an orgy of excess.  The heading fonts are overly-elaborate and difficult to read, a condition which is exacerbated by embellishing them with drop-shadows.  The text is too small, and is often underlain by watermark images including, Nodens save me, latin text that makes reading the book a torturous ordeal.  Especially bad are the 'spot rules' side-bars which consist of white text printed in a miniscule font on a black background.  And then, just because the page isn't already busy enough, it is further embellished with faux burn marks along the margins and between the columns.  My poor aging eyes were bleeding after five minutes.  By the time I was done reading it I'd failed two consecutive SAN checks was gibbering madly.

The material is also very badly organized, making it very difficult to look things up even with the help of the index.  The insanity rules, for example are spread throughout the book instead of contained within a single chapter.  It would be ironic, but not surprising, if the insanity rules actually drove some Keeper insane.

I took sixth edition out for a spin at my last session and several times failed, after five minutes of fruitless searching, to find a given rule.  I then picked up my second edition rules and found what I needed in less than ten seconds.  Every time.

So, in a nutshell, Call of Cthulhu, sixth edition, is an excellent rule system flawed by incredibly poor design choices that make the book an absolute nightmare to read and use.  I'm glad to have the new rules, but hiring Abdul Alhazred to do the layout probably wasn't the wisest choice.  Hopefully, the forthcoming seventh edition will be designed to be read and used as a game book should be.

Session report: The Molay House Mystery

Our first session centered around an archetypal haunted house set in Boston in 1921, a premise that has kicked off many a Call of Cthulhu campaign.  A young woman, Vivian Molay, had recently inherited the estate of her late uncle Victor.  Vivian, who had grown up in this house, raised by her uncle and aunt, had only unhappy memories of her childhood and wanted to sort out her uncle's estate quickly and sell it off.  Victor ran an import company and was a collector of art and artifacts, and Vivian retained the services of antiquarian, Randal Ward, to assess the collection.  Because she had been harassed by various parties wishing to obtain artifacts from her late uncle's collection, she hired Morgan Lynch, a Boston area private investigator to provide security while she dealt with the estate.  Finally, her boyfriend, Damian Chase, a wealthy dilettante, was on hand to offer moral support.

The three investigators spent the whole first day inspecting the house and taking inventory of its contents, including an impressive collection of French impressionist paintings and ancient artifacts from around the world.  Morgan checked out the basement, which contained a coal room and furnace, a wine cellar, and a mysterious bricked-up crawl space.  The second floor contained the master bedroom, Vivian's childhood bedroom an empty bedroom and a study, and the attic contained Camille Molay's sick room and a store room.

While the others were inspecting the rest of the house, Morgan got some tools from the garden shed and got to work demolishing the bricked up space in the basement: he crawled through into a another small room and opened up a cellar door in the floor.  Dropping down into what looked like a cold room he was horrified to find the dessicated corpse of a teenaged boy chained to the floor.

Meanwhile, Vivian disclosed why she was so uncomfortable in the house: at the age of thirteen she was forced to care for her invalid aunt Camille, who was confined to a bedroom in the attic.  As her aunt's illness progressed, her mind began to slip, and caring for her became an increasingly unpleasant task - the old woman sat alone in her rocking chair, staring out the window and demanding tea.  One day, Vivian brought the afternoon tea only to find that her aunt's body hanging from a home-made noose, her limp body twisting slowly from the rafters.  Vivian swore, though it was likely the fancy of a traumatized young girl, that her dead aunt then opened her eyes and stared accusingly at her niece.  The episode left Vivian in Ravensview Asylum for a time, to treat her mental trauma, before releasing her to a girl's boarding school; she had not been back to the house since.

Later that afternoon, there was a visit from a mobster who claimed be collecting $500 that Victor Molay owed to  Mr. Gambini.  He also mentioned, in an off-hand manner, that Mr. Gambini had purchased an antique silver chalice from Molay, and would appreciate its delivery as soon as it was located.  Since Molay's receipts made no mention of an outstanding debt to Gambini, the investigators assumed that the chalice was the real reason for the visit.

Over dinner it was noticed that the silverware bore the Molay family coat of arms with the inscription, do your duty, come what may, which Randal recognized as the motto of the Knights Templar.

Late in the day the investigators heard a rhythmic creaking coming from the third floor attic.  When they went up stairs they were able to determine that the sound was coming from Camille Molay's bedroom.  Opening the door they were stepped into the room, which was now stiflingly warm and heavy with the smell of camphor, and they could see someone sitting in the rocking chair, rocking back and forth, but there was no response to their queries.  Cautiously, Damian worked his away around the room to get a view of the chair's occupant and found Vivian, herself, sitting in a daze, completely unaware of her surroundings.  When he shook her and shouted her name, she came to herself and, horrified to find herself in her aunt's bedroom, she burst into tears, afraid and confused.

After calming Vivian down and getting her to bed, the investigators continued to search the house.  One of them searched an attic store room, which contained Camille's old clothes and effects, and hidden behind some boxes, the noose she had used to hang herself.  Meanwhile, an investigation of Victory Molay's office yielded recent receipts of import shipments to the Church of the Celestial Redeemer on Battery Street, a church that  was gutted three years ago in a tragic fire.  There were also receipts of payments made to a Tony Gambini under the heading 'customs inspection'.  Gambini was known to Morgan Lynch as a local mob boss with ties to New York's Marolto Family.

A concealed door in Victor's study led to a small library containing an esoteric collection of books on the occult, erotica, and pornography, including works by Aleister Crowley and the Marquis de Sade.  On one of the shelves was the silver chalice mentioned by the mobster, which Randal Ward recognized as the Chalice of Antioch, which the Knights Templar brought back from Outremere, and was once thought to be the holy Grail, itself - a notion dismissed by contemporary scholars. Also in the library was Victory Molay's journal in which the investigators that Vivian's parents were killed in a fire and that she and her twin brother Daniel had come to live with their aunt and uncle. Daniel had become fascinated first with his uncle's pornography collection, and later with his occult books.  Sometime later Victor caught Daniel and Vivian in the garden shed, naked.  Vivian was in a daze, apparently under her brother's mental control and had no memory of the incident.  After this, Daniel was sent to a succession of boarding schools, from each of which he was soon expelled.  As Daniel became gradually more recalcitrant, rebellious and dangerous, Victor finally locked him up in the basement.

The investigators met with Gambini at his offices in the back rooms of the speakeasy he operated, and asked him about his business relationship with Victor Molay.  Gambini told them that he had been paid, on several occasions, to use his influence on the docks to make sure that customs inspectors passed over certain of Molay's shipments.  When questioned about the chalice, Gambini said that it was merely a curio he payed Molay to import from the old country.  Molay's records made no mention of such a transaction, and the story contradicted Vivian's assertion that she remembered the chalice from her childhood and that it was supposedly an old family heirloom.

Next, the investigators went to check out the Church of the Celestial Redeemer, which was indeed a burned-out shell.  They attempted to enter, but found that the doors were chained and padlocked.  They asked locals if anyone had noticed recent deliveries made to the church, and were told rumours that the church might soon be renovated and reopened.  A limousine pulled up to the investigators on the street and they were invited in to speak with a heavy-set elderly man named Sebastian Crawe who offered them $8,000 for the chalice.  He gave them his card and left them to contemplate his offer.  Morgan Lynch demanded that Vivian come clean and stop treating them like saps.  He wasn't buying her story that she had no memory of a twin brother and had no idea why so many people were after the chalice.  Damian was angered by Morgan's brusque manner and took Vivian home, leaving Morgan and Randal to find their own way back.

Shortly after Damian and Vivian arrived back at the house, a pair of armed gunmen burst in and demanded the chalice. Damian led them upstairs to the study, trying to delay the thugs as long as possible.  Morgan and Randal arrived at the house and saw a strange car in the driveway and the open front door of the house.  Wary for trouble, Morgan readied his Colt .45 and they crept into the house and followed the voices upstairs where they were able to surprise the gunmen.  A short fight ensued in which both intruders were killed, though Morgan was shot twice.  He dismissed his injuries as mere flesh wounds, and settled for having his wounds cleaned and bandaged instead of seeking medical attention.  A search of the bodies revealed that both had a tattoo of a flaming crucifix on his wrist, which Damien recognized from his occult dabbling as the sign of a cult known as the Ashen Brotherhood.  The bodies were dragged downstairs and dumped in the basement.

That night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, Damian sat up perusing occult tomes in the library, and decided to check on Vivian.  She was not in her bedroom and, suspicious, Damian ran upstairs to Camille's bedroom where he found her, wearing one of Camille's old dressing-gowns, throwing the end of the hangman's noose over a rafter.  She broke down in hysterics when she awoke from her trance, and Damian spent the rest of the night watching over her.

The next day Morgan left the house to stake out Sebastian Crawe's manor.  Damian went down to the basement to further inspect the corpses of the cultists and to his horror they rose up and shambled after him. He fled up the stairs into the kitchen and slammed the door, and held it shut while screaming to Randal for help.  The corpses soon battered their way through the door, however then fell upon Damien and tore him apart with their bare hands.  Randal, meanwhile fetched a quilt, set it on fire then threw it over the heads of the undead horrors, and then fled as the house went up in flames.

Thus endeth the session, with Damian dead, Morgan on a stakeout, and Randal running down the street screaming in terror.  It remains to be seen whether Vivian escaped the burning house, the flaming corpses, and the vengeful spirit of her twin brother.  The mystery of why so many people are after the Chalice of Antioch remains to be solved.

Out of the Dungeon

After many years of running fantasy campaigns, I'm suffering from dungeon burn-out.  I just can't muster the enthusiasm that I need to run a good campaign, so I've decided to put my fantasy campaign on hiatus, shift gears and trade in the swords and armour for Tommy Guns and Elder Signs.

So I dusted off my old Call of Cthulhu boxed set and tried running a session of Lovecraftian horror for the first time in nearly thirty years.  I bought this game, on the advice of the game store owner, sometime in 1983 or 1984, and it was my introduction to the works of H.P. Lovecraft.  To say that it captured my imagination would be a gross understatement.  I spent countless hours reading and rereading the rule book and supplements, marveling at the mythos creatures, the sinister spells, and the tomes of forbidden lore.  It is fair to say that Call of Cthulhu has influenced every roleplaying campaign I've run since but, ironically, I've only ever actually run one or two sessions of Call of Cthulhu, back when I first bought it.

It's not always easy to find a group of players willing to give Call of Cthulhu a shot.  Let's face it, the game can be a tough sell to a lot of gamers.  Many of us engage in the hobby for the sense of wish-fulfillment it gives us: finding treasure, leveling up, and actually killing monsters.  It's a much smaller subset of gamers who get off on being messily torn apart, or going mad, whose only pay-off for successful play is living just long enough to uncover the next layer of the conspiracy.

Yet, there are enough such players to have kept Call of Cthulhu alive and well, and essentially unchanged, for more than three decades, which is an impressive accomplishment in the gaming industry - a testament to the lure of Lovecraft's mythos.

It was a challenge to run a good session, though.  Horror is hard enough to write, let alone to play.  In addition to the game master's normal duties of adjudicating player actions, keeping track of NPCs and running combats, you must also set the tone of the adventure, control the pacing, and provide enough clues for players to unravel the mystery.  That's quite a lot to manage and my old, long-vanquished stage fright made an unwelcome encore.

There are just so many things that can spoil a CoC session, and having uncooperative players practically guarantees failure.  Goofing around at the wrong time can spoil the mood, and rebelling against genre conventions, instead of embracing them, can ruin the game for everyone.  Horror genre gaming requires a lot more cooperation and collaboration between the players and GM than in many other types of gaming, especially a typical fantasy dungeon adventure, where part of the challenge and the fun is the almost adversarial stance of beating the GM's dungeon.  CoC requires a whole different outlook and style of play and it can be delicate juggling act, but I was fortunate in having a group of players who were willing to play along, buy into the premise, and work to make the session a success.

Consequently, the first session was a great deal of fun and, as all good adventures should, left the investigators with more questions than answers.

Until next time, save the last bullet for yourself.

 

Cthulhu Wars

I just heard the news that Sandy Peterson is working on a new board game: Cthulhu Wars.  This is sort of like Lovecraftian Risk, where instead of taking on the roles of human investigators trying to save the world, players assume the mantle Great Old Ones competing to conquer it.  The game looks amazing from what I've seen so far, and best of all it will come with 28 mm scale miniatures for each faction, including the Great Old Ones, cultists, and servitor races and creatures.  By making the miniatures 28 mm, they can serve double duty in Call of Cthulhu games!

Check out the video interview with Sandy Peterson over on Lovecraft Ezine and be sure to scroll down to see the amazingly detailed sculpts of the miniatures.  These are some of the best looking Cthulhu mythos miniatures I've seen yet, and they certainly blow the doors off my old Grenadier minis.  So I'll be anxiously waiting for the Kickstarter, which Sandy anticipates launching sometime in the next month or so.  I don't much like crowd source funding, but I plan to jump in on this one when it launches.

Greens of Cthulhu, himself, and a human cultist for scale.

How Long Will You Survive?

I never thought I'd write about a video game on an old-school roleplaying blog, but Ubisoft's ZombiU, a launch title for the new Nintendo WiiU console, is a survival horror game that captures old school play style in a way that I've never seen in any computer or console game.

The game's subtitle throws down the gauntlet: How long will you survive?
This is more than just a catch-phrase, it is an concise summation of what this game is all about.

You play a survivor in zombie-infested London after the plague of 2012 and your goal is to stay alive for as long as you can.  No easy task; I lost my first character five seconds into the game and went through nearly thirty characters in the first four hours of play.

You begin this dark, gritty, and intensely frightening game by escaping a pursuing horde of the infected, hopefully finding refuge in a safehouse in the London underground, guided via intercom by an enigmatic character known as the Prepper (a modern-day disciple of the sixteenth century occultist, John Dee and a member of a cabal known as Dee's Ravens), then proceed to explore your surroundings by the dim glow of your flashlight, armed with your trusty cricket bat.

It's not all fun-and-games in the cozy confines of the subway tunnels, though; eventually you have to hit the streets to activate and hack into CCTV networks to get a window on the world above.  That's when life gets really tough; the infected lurk everywhere and you need to watch out for corpses - sometimes they get up.

A typical Friday night in Winnipeg

Reviews of ZombiU are all over the map: some reviewers love it; others hate it, and it's easy to see why.  The game is hard.  Damned hard.  If you're looking for a first-person shooter game to unwind with and mindlessly kill some zombies then you need to look elsewhere.  This is not the game for you.

The pace is slow, the combat is deadly, and when your character dies that's it.  Game over.  No reload, no respawn, no backsies.  You start with a new character and lose all your experience and gear.  Moreover if you're bitten by an infected - even once - you're done for and your character rises as one of them.  So if you want to retrieve your gear you need to find your infected character, kill it and loot his or her bug-out-bag.  Of course whatever killed you will still be there, so the number of infected will have increased by one.

This is a big deal because the infected are bloody hard to kill.  One by itself is a threat.  Two is often more than you can deal with.  Three or more and its time to utter the catchphrase of the OSR - Oh, shit, run!  The ubiquitous cricket bat is a ponderous and slow weapon.  You need to time your attack just right - if you swing too soon there is no time for another try (the infected are surprisingly fast); swing too late and, well, you get the idea.  Furthermore, these are no eggshell-craniumed walkers from The Walking Dead that can be killed with the casual thrust of a screwdriver: to put down one of the infected you'll need to hit it five or six times.  So clearly the cricket bat is really only effective against one foe at a time.

Guns are faster.  You can shoot quickly enough to deal with a couple of oncoming foes if you have a steady hand and cool nerve, and you only need to hit one about three times to put it down.  The problem with this is that the zombies lurch erratically as they charge, making a head shot difficult and if you panic you can blow through a clip of priceless ammo very quickly indeed.  Because you have to scavenge every round of ammo, and there is never enough, I save the gun for when I'm really up shit creek.

This is usually when my slide locks back, empty.

So what makes ZombiU appealing to old school roleplayers?  First and foremost, the game challenges the player, not the character.  Yes, your character does get level-ups and weapon upgrades, but these come slowly and are subtle improvements.  To succeed at this game you need to plan carefully, scout your surroundings, loot anything that isn't nailed down, take your time, and don't bite off more than you can bash.  One of the most important skills is knowing when to run and where to run.  If you don't have an escape route planned out you'll end up trapped in a dead-end or flee into a horde.  Does this play style sound familiar?

This explains the many negative reviews that ZombiU has garnered.  The level of difficulty and frustration is more than a lot of gamers are used to, especially if what they are used to is Call of Duty.  It's kind of like throwing a group 4E players into an old school dungeon crawl: they charge in, die very quickly, then complain about lack of balanced encounters.

In ZombiU, like in old school rpgs, there are no kewl powerz or awesome weapons, its just you and your wits against an overwhelming foe.

This contributes to the very effective sense of horror in the game.  I'm rarely scared by horror movies (in fact, I recently posted about misnomer of the horror genre in my other blog), but this game scares the crap out of me.  I find I can't play for more than half an hour before quitting with trembling hands, sweaty palms and my  heart trying to break out of my chest.  The dim lighting, confined spaces and restricted peripheral vision create a very claustrophic experience.  Things can very easily sneak up behind you, particularly when you have to look at the game pad to manage your inventory.  This adds to the tension of the game - you have to rummage quickly through your knapsack or something will come up on you from behind.

Here's a video clip of game play of a character trying to get to Buckingham Palace that will give you a good idea of what I'm talking about.


I'm no great fan of video games, but my feelings about ZombiU should be pretty clear by now: I love it. It is a scary, intense, and insanely difficult game that will undoubtedly challenge me for a long time to come, and it hits all the sweet spots that I love about old school roleplaying games.

 So, how long will you survive?