Divis Mortis

Well-implemented and instantly captivating. It did get a bit cheesy towards the end, but that is when most people trot out the cheese plates anyway. It's an odd mix of humour and zombie horror; for me, the former won over the latter. What with some of the failure messages -- the one that got me was the response to an attempt to pick up a female corpse: "That's disgusting. Girls have cooties." -- the descriptions of some of the attacking zombies (the first one I met was a crossdressing goth) and the somewhat preposterous conclusion, I could only think that this was meant to be a comedy. Not a laugh-a-minute comedy, certainly, but a source of gentle amusement nonetheless.

I have just used the phrase "gentle amusement" to describe a game that involves killing zombies with skillets. That's ... a little unusual.

It is perhaps this gentle(?) humour, juxtaposed with the horror theme, that captivated me. Because very little of the protagonist's character comes through at all, and generally it is that aspect of the game that will often make the difference between a good game and a bad one. Even with the tacked-on romance at the end, I was uncertain as to the protagonist's gender: the "girls have cooties" comment above had earlier cemented in my mind that he's male, but the budding romance with a rescued man ... well, is our hero gay, then? And did he really luck out with the only other survivor in the hospital being also gay? Frankly, I suspect the tacked-on romance of being there specifically to lampshade the concept of tacked-on romances, and to play with our expectations.

Cheese omelette, hominy grits, coffee.