Minecraft Zombies!

Since its inception, Minecraft has had a lasting effect on the gaming landscape, and not just in format or controls but in aesthetics of all things. Several developers have made this their own making first person shooters, arena death matches, interactive stories, but all while using the blocky style and incorporating elements like the pickaxe and breaking the environment. Greg Sergeant has taken this style and built upon it by creating a first person shooter with a real sense of urgency.

You can check out my stream of Still Not Dead embedded below:

In SND you are an unnamed protagonist with a simple six shooter put into a randomized map and have to survive by killing a certain number of monsters in an unknown time limit. All of this before a terrifying giant flaming skull comes from nowhere and stalks you until you can kill the quota and get out of Dodge by finding the exit. There are off course icons on the map to show you where to eventually go, and you are given the number of enemies to kill, but you can’t dilly dally and get to the murdering, since the skull WILL come for you. It really is exciting to see the skull on the map as the guarantee of your death, and then frantically run around trying to get that last kill.

To make this happen, you are also given places on the map to pick up weapons, though the normal six-shooter isn’t bad on damage to begin with. However, I did notice it’s not the most accurate weapon in the world and the normal strafe and shoot doesn’t really play well with this basic weapon. Even with weapons available, they often don’t get picked up, because of the major time crunch to get all your kills in and still escape, so I only got the chance to pick up a couple in all my runs.

There is also the blessings and curses to worry about for each run as well. This means that at the beginning of each level, you are given a choice of three random perks that will help in a subtle way, but at the end of each level, you are also given the choice of three negative curses that will afflict your next run. On paper it’s a nice addition to the gameplay, and it does give the player some agency to pick what happens to them either good or bad. But, it didn’t seem all that fair in play since the negatives seem to outweigh the positives, but that could be my rotten luck.

SND is at its core, a very simple game, with simple graphics, and basic gameplay. However, simple doesn’t mean bad. It’s actually quite nice to have a clear cut vision of how to win, and the panic is real when the giant skull is on your map and making a B line to send you to hell. It’s true that the graphics are not great, there could always be more detail, and the GUI layout is a bit confusing at the top with not a lot of labels to let you know what number means what. But even after all of that, I found myself really enjoying it, and its priced appropriately at $10, so it’s not gonna break the bank for anyone to check this out.