It is as strange as the title suggests.

First, a bit of housekeeping: posting will be light for a few days as I recover from an apocalyptically nasty stomach bug. Right now I can’t move around too much, and can barely be bothered to type, this review is all I feel up to today. Hopefully my fragile Living metabolism will get its act back together by, say, Wednesday.

Second, I made the mistake of going to the Z section of the Xbox Live Indie Games on the old Marketplace (Tycho of Penny-Arcade suggests the abbreviation XBLIG, and who am I to argue?), and there are quite a few games with ‘Zombie’ in the title, all priced to move at 80 points, which is about a dollar, I believe. We had some Microsoft Points lying around the account anyway, so I picked up Zombie Outhouse to follow I Made a Game with Zombies In It (l33t speak translated into actual english), which was reviewed yesterday.

Zombie Outhouse.. well, it’s different, I suppose. Story wise, apparently your character, a living person, has to use the facilities at an outhouse one night, only to discover after doing so that it’s labelled as being for Zombies only, or some such.

Segregated bathrooms are a classic and tragic form of discrimination, so it’s perhaps not so hard to believe that they would exist for the Differently Animated, once society has moved beyond shooting and into George Crow laws, as it were. (Named for George Romero, naturally).

At any rate, for some reason a horde of 2D cutout ‘Zombies’ with limited animation start running toward the player’s perspective, and he/she has to fend them off with a gun. Gameplay wise, this resembles those annoying flash banner ads where you have to place a target on something and shoot to ‘win’ a prize; it’s not terribly sophisticated. The soundtrack, however, is very odd; it seems to consist of people mumbling into microphones, spliced together with random animal calls. A lot of cat noises in particular.

Questions arise from playing this XBLIG: Am I the bad guy here? Am I merely fending off the rightful users of this public restroom with violence? Whose cats are these, anyway, and why are they so agitated?

Sadly, none of these questions were answered, at least not in the time I spent playing Zombie Outhouse. Perhaps they’re holding on to the Big Reveal for a sequel; who can say?

Regardless of potentially deeper hidden meaning waiting to be uncovered by later releases, the overt violence against the Differently Animated forces the ZRC to condemn this particular game. For shame… whoever made it. For shame.

Tags: Videogames

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, October 4th, 2010 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.