Arma II: DayZ - Zombie hiking simulator.
DayZ is a mod for Arma II, a game that is made from the same gaming engine that is used by military training simulators.
The mod changes Arma II from a military game to a zombie apocalypse survival simulator. Based on a 225 square kilometre map of a fictional post-Soviet country of Chernarus, most of one's time is spent hiding from zombies (rather than haphazardly shooting through them like in most games) while you scavenge ex-populated areas for food, water, tools and weaponry.
There's only one difficulty setting, which is hardcore. When you die you go right back to square one. This makes every player on a (50 player) server paranoid as all hell and one tends to find that interacting with other players is generally more trouble than it's worth. Especially since getting shot in the arm could lead to bleeding out over the next five minutes if you don't have anything to patch yourself up with or morphine to numb the pain - or even if they miss, the sound of their gun fire could alert 20 zombies to hungrily introduce themselves to you like the friendly fellas they are.
DayZ has reversed Arma II's waning sales into the Steam top 10 list, where it's been for quite a few weeks.
http://dayzmod.com/
Does anyone play?
I'm currently at a point where I don't HAVE to go into towns, I can get food from hunting, gutting and cooking animals. But I really need to find myself a compass because apparently I'm not very good at using the sun (and at night there's often too many clouds to use the stars).
