Undying, the video game review

Undying is a video game about the inexorable. The sword of Damocles of her impending death hangs over its protagonist, Anling: bitten by a zombie, she knows that one day she too will abandon her consciousness and become a ravenous undead. But it is also, above all, a video game about what each of us leaves behind: in the midst of the zombie apocalypse, the woman must not only protect little Cody, her son, not yet able to fend for himself, but must also ensure he has the means to cope alone, one day.

By combining proven survival mechanics, in which it is necessary to collect and use anything that can help one survive a little longer, with the ability to teach the child practically everything she does, Vanimals' production manages to convey its core theme in an extremely powerful way: one day we will be gone, but those who come after us will carry within them and with them what we have taught them in our time together. Hoping it is a good time, hoping that at least during his childhood he can be protected from the ugliness of the world.

For Those Who Come After

The game opens with the dramatic moment when Anling, intent on protecting Cody from the undead horde, is bitten. It is immediately established that she must die, that there is no hope for her. The inevitable is usually a condition to which the player is unaccustomed. In most cases, there is a remedy for almost everything. At most, it can be prepared beforehand, through a series of events that lead to the point from which one learns that there will be no return. Not here. It's all clear from the start: Anling will become a zombie, her days are numbered, and there is no way she can save herself. The most she can do, therefore, what she must do, is to ensure that at least her beloved son can have some future.

How is clearly the focus of the gameplay. Undying is structured as a very classic survival game, in which you collect food and water, necessary for the sustenance of the two protagonists, and the materials needed to build weapons and tools or improve various types of instruments. The woman's condition implies further attention: as the sun sets, the infection worsens her condition, so she must always go to rest by a certain hour; not only that, the disease impairs various vital functions over time. In terms of gameplay, this translates into a limited time to do things, with every hour to be counted, and the need to move while evaluating every eventuality.

Undying: An Ordinary, Yet Touching Survival Game

Overall, everything works. There is no game element that is particularly significant or innovative: you kill zombies with melee or firearms, you search houses, supermarkets, camps, hoping to find useful things, you craft objects using platforms that, after being upgraded, give access to further creations. And, despite few creative and playful flashes, it's fine that way. It's the fact of bringing Cody with you that changes everything. It changes when you have to protect him from a hungry one; when, after a fight, he is still scared, and then he needs to be caressed and calmed; when it's raining outside and you have to keep him sheltered, so he doesn't get sick; when both he and Anling are hungry and you have little food and you have to decide who to feed.

These seem like small things, dynamics that in strictly playful terms are indeed translated with the simple press of a button. Yet these are what make the difference, what ensure that, at least for the most part, Undying is a truly touching experience. In the long run, however, this feeling diminishes somewhat, mainly because it is not accompanied by an evolution of the game mechanics related to Cody. Teaching him once to dismantle a car, another time to repair an engine, yet another time to cook, then allows him to directly take care of certain things, but whether he learns a skill or not, or uses it or not, doesn't really matter: the player directly controls only Anling, and she will always be the center of the action.

It follows, therefore, that, since the second character element is not particularly relevant at a gameplay level, the game system eventually suffers from the typical repetitiveness of the genre. The loop represented by finding resources, using those resources to create new objects, using the new objects to find even more resources, eventually becomes boring, and that "eventually" is a limit represented by the player's feeling for the genre. In this sense, the narrative component tries to make the experience deeper and more significant, with partial success: the stories of the survivors encountered are almost all interesting, and in some cases there are crossroads that open or close new paths; that of Anling and Cody holds some secrets to discover; but they are not enough, however, to compensate for the lack of rhythm of a gameplay that is always solid and clear, but never exciting.