March of the Living is FTL but with zombies, out now

March of the Living

Zombies zombies zombies. For years people have moaned that zombie media has reached saturation point, but I'm not sure that will ever be true. One zombie game dies, and another inevitably rises to take its place. March of the Living is the latest, and while it sounds like a particularly grim March of the Penguins sequel, it's actually an FTL-inspired roguelite where you guide a group of survivors to safety their horrible deaths. It's out now, and you can grab it from Steam here.

It's procedurally generated, of course, with "80,000 words of quality writing", and "over 160 unique events". The combat's real-time, but when you're not doing that you'll need to scavenge, trade, and do other things that zombocalypse survivors like to do. I said it was FTL-inspired, and developer Machine 22 says as much in the marketing, but I'm reminded of the lovely Organ Trail too. (That was inspired by edutainment classic The Oregon Trail, which also inspired FTL. It's inspiration-inception up in here.) Basically, zombies are a good fit for journey-based survival games.

March of the Living is out now, and if you buy it in the next few days you'll save 10%.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.