Remember not so long ago when it seemed like you couldn’t throw a digital stick without hitting some sort of zombie apocalypse video game? And that included a handful of attempts at an MMO, such as H1Z1 and Day Z. I remember not being terribly impressed with either of those efforts, and that was before they seemed to all but abandon their zombie experience in favor of jumping on the PvP Battle Royale bandwagon.

Well, anyhow fast forward to this past weekend when the Steam Summer Sale coughed up the suggestion of 7 Days to Die on my store feed. $8.49, or $13.59 for a 2-copy special with an extra for a friend to play. Still marked as “early access” but what the hell, for that price I decided to buy the 2-for-1 and give it a whirl, especially since I’d recently heard an endorsement giving praise to its building features.

Now apparently this game has been in early access status since 2013, which I didn’t know at the time and sounds really bad. However, I guess in 2020 we can call that seven years to live? Because whatever it might have been before, at the moment it’s become a fairly solid experience.

Before I go on, let me digress and talk about Fallout 4 for a moment, in particular its base building features. They were an endless source of frustration for me because one of my favorite post-apoc genre things is seeing survival forts adapted out of existing buildings of the “old world.” But Fallout’s existing structures were often not easy to build off of, or unavailable for building, or also often indestructible so you couldn’t modify or remove them. Various mods attempted to address these issues but they all had to wrestle with a system that from the ground up was very limited and unfriendly to alteration. When (courtesy of mods like the excellent Sim Settlements) I was able to get some semi-good compounds going, the occasional AI raid felt lackluster, to the point I eventually would end up doing things like cheat spawning a group of Deathclaws just to see how my defenses held up against them.

So far nearly everything in 7 Days to Die I’ve run across can be built upon or destroyed, including the very ground itself which you can dig into in order to create trenches, pits and even tunnels. The exceptions would be the “land claim” area of another player (though this can be solved by allying with them) and the NPC trader compounds dotted around the map. In addition to buying and selling those NPC traders can also give various quests which felt familiar to me as a Star Wars Galaxies veteran: go to this spot and clear it out/retrieve items/dig for treasure, then come back and be rewarded with XP, loot and “Duke Coins” — casino chips which have become de facto coin of the realm.

The attribute and perks system in leveling up will be familiar to Fallout players, though instead of a global “gunsmithing” skill, for example, crafting of weapons is locked to each weapon skill tree, like brass knuckles under Brawling. Fortunately there are also skill books you can find out in the wilds, as well as just plain breaking into an abandoned gun safe to find a high-quality boomstick. The catch, of course, is that you have to explore to find those, and exploring means zombies.

Not that staying put doesn’t have its own complications. You need to constantly be on the lookout for food and water, and anything that’s not sealed in a can has a chance to make you sick, though doing things like boiling the water from that murky river first helps. Meanwhile it can get really dark at night but lighting torches and campfires, in addition to other non-subtle activities like chopping down trees can raise the invisible “heat map” of a given area. Over time if that gets over a certain threshold, the Undead Home Owner’s Association might send a shambling representative by your property, and if they find you they may call in a group of your unfriendly neighbors. On the other hand, it’s still a good idea to hole up somewhere when the sun goes down, because by default settings the slow shamblers of the daytime become sprinters at night (you can alter this for a more Romero-esque experience if you wish, it’s still plenty scary in my opinion when you can’t frickin’ see or are searching the tight corridors of a wrecked hospital).

Everything is destructible given enough time and persistence, and we all know how persistent zed can be when he’s hungry. So if he starts banging on your door or even your bricked-up wall, you’d best deal with him before he gets in or at least weakens it for the next guest. On the plus side, you can make holes and break stuff, too. Can I knock out an upstairs window and then use it as a balcony entrance for a catwalk around the upper part of the house? Yes I can! Can I bust out a flimsy doorframe and block it with cubes of solid iron (again breakable, but not at all easily)? Yep, that too. Dig pits and fill them with zombie-skewering spikes? Yep, just watch you don’t fall in yourself. You can see some of the alterations we’ve made, like part of the catwalk and also window bars and spikes in the photo at the top of the blog. A land claim also isn’t technically required to build, either. I spent a night once in a treehouse out in an abandoned town and was able to take wood from the tree it was built in to make a catwalk bridge to reach the the roof of a house across the way.

But ideally you want somewhere to return to with decent defenses in place. And boy, will they ever be tested. Even without PvP involved this game is deadly and moments of inattention or arrogance can get you killed, or worse, infected. Yes, zombies and zombie animals(!) have a chance to transfer their dread disease to your person any time they hit you. You can lessen the chance by wearing armor (styled in an appropriate Mad Max aesthetic of course) but once you contract it the slow counter starts and you got about seven in-game days before you die. Oddly enough antibiotics are a cure for this, but you can go a long time without finding any of those and meanwhile your stats will slowly get worse and worse, provided you don’t just go for suicide or your buddies decide on assisted suicide. You’ll resurrect healthy at your bedroll (minus your stuff and maybe some XP) and it doesn’t seem like your old body gets back up hungry in those cases. Of course I haven’t yet seen the results of the infection running its course completely…

Anyhow, you might think that infection time is why the game is called 7 Days to Die.

Well, uh, there’s also this thing called the Blood Moon Night.

When the sun goes down on the seventh day, a terrifying horde will descend upon you and you’d best be prepared. I don’t want to spoil the experience too much but trust me when I say it’s some white-knuckle shit. Survive that and you’ve got another seven days to repair and prepare, but unless you (and maybe others on the server) have been dying a lot the “gamestage” level will likely have risen and it’ll be worse. Let’s just say on Day 7 they didn’t even get in to our safehouse. On Day 14 I was fighting the last wave off in our living room with the benefit of pain drugs and a set of bloody brass knuckles, and that was after running my AK-47 dry and using two out of three grenades that I had not intended to have to use.

The days go by frighteningly fast once you realize the cycle of doom you’re locked into. In the aftermath of Day 14 we have plans for dealing with Day 21 but if we can’t get our hands on more ammo — like, a lot more ammo — we’re gonna have a bad time.

But we’re also having a great time, because this is probably the closest we’ve ever come to having the immersion of an all-around zombie apocalypse experience in game form. It’s been well worth that Steam Sale price tag and the sale is still on through tomorrow (July 9) if any of this tickles your fancy. I highly recommend buying the 2-for-1 deal so you can gift one to a friend who can watch your back.

Oh and did I mention the abandoned Wild West town that’s part of the default map (representing the fictional Navezgane County, Arizona)? It’s like they know me…