ShredDead: you are too good at this to die, so you may as well shred the zombies

ShredDead's description starts like a thousand other zombie games, then it swerves, and that is the moment I decided to write about it.

The world is over, the zombie apocalypse has arrived, you are ready to make your last stand and go down in a blaze of glory.

The problem is, you are too good at this asymmetric warfare thing, and this last stand is taking forever.

At this point, writes the studio, this is not about survival. This is about fun.

Why that joke is good design

Because it solves the genre's credibility problem.

Every horde survival game has the same contradiction: it tells you about the end of the world, and two hours later you are a god erasing three hundred corpses a minute. The store page's tone no longer matches what is on screen.

ShredDead takes the problem from the other end: it admits in its opening line that you are going to become ridiculously strong, and turns that into the subject.

That is writing, and it costs nothing. A lot of studios should think about it.

What you do

You shoot them, you burn them, you blow them up. And when all else fails, you shred the dead, with your very own heavy-duty industrial shredder.

The studio calls its loop the zombie blender: you get into a flow state methodically decimating the unending deluge, or you have your grunts do it for you, or both.

There is a skill tree to explore to optimise the killing, and gear to kit your grunts out with, which the zombies are nice enough to deliver right to your doorstep.

The reception, and it is more mixed

105 reviews, 77 per cent positive. Mostly positive, but with a quarter of players not following along.

That is a notable gap compared with the day's other releases, and it deserves stating honestly. A 4.79 euro game whose main argument is humour has a narrow margin: when the joke runs out, only the loop remains, and the loop is everybody's.

What divides people in this genre is usually one of three things: readability when the screen fills up, a progression curve that flattens, or enemy variety. It will take more distance to know which.

What it is worth

Under five euros, the question is not whether this is the year's best game.

It is whether you will want to start a run on an evening with nothing planned, to watch a mass of corpses disappear into a machine while listening to a podcast.

For that, the format is right, the tone is right, and the pitch is honest: nobody is selling you a life-changing experience.

One last word on the art direction, because it is part of the joke. The deliberately coarse pixel art, the blood spraying in big squares, the top-down view: all of it tells the player not to take things seriously, and it is consistent with a game that opens by explaining your last stand is dragging on.

Got a zombie game that owns being funny? The list is shorter than you think, add to it on the InsertCoins Discord.