State of Decay finally comes out today (on XBLA). I feel like I’ve been waiting for this game forever. Actually I’ve only been waiting for it since 2011. That’s almost forever!

State of Decay is a zombie RPG that isn’t about killing zombies, but rather trying to survive their presence for as long as possible. It’s about collecting survivors, trying to set up a base camp and scavenge supplies, and essentially avoid getting eaten. There is permadeath.

It’s essentially a single-player Day Z, except it was in development before Day Z came out last year. Where it differs from Day Z is mostly in that it has some essence of a storyline, and there must be some sort of definitive “end” to the game, where Day Z is just infinitely open-ended. Since State of Decay is currently single player, there’s something to be said for the purer experience of surviving against zombies, and not surviving against assholes in a world that happens to have zombies that Day Z became.

Both games aim to accomplish a similar core experience, just in slightly different ways.

I’m excited to dig into State of Decay today. I know a lot of people are “over” zombies, but whatever. I’m not. As a standardized “enemy” I think zombies are fairly boring, and I don’t find myself interested in games that task you with just slaughtering thousands of zombies anymore. But the games that put the emphasis on survival and dire circumstance I’ll play every day of the week.

If that sort of thing appeals to you as well, you’ll probably want to check out State of Decay. If you haven’t heard of it before, you can probably read some previews… but I think that hands down the best option for seeing what the game is about is just watching someone play a little bit of it (the end of the third one is my favorite).