Undying was one of the hidden games of E3 2019, and I mean that in a quite literal sense. It was one of five titles on display at Giant Games’ booth, which was tucked into the northeastern corner of the South Hall of the Staples Center, surrounded by merchandise stands and low-budget hardware dealers.
Undying was barely mentioned in Giant’s pre-show press releases and its kiosk was well behind Giant’s desk, facing the wall, behind several other games like Pascal’s Wager that Giant clearly wanted to hype up. If E3 has difficulty settings, Undying cranked it up to impossible mode.
I am glad I managed to find it, by what amounts to sheer dumb luck, because Undying has an interesting, melancholy premise for a survival game. You play as Anling, a single mother who lives in an unspecified city (presumably American, given how easy it is to find firearms), who’s trying to keep her young son Cody safe in the early days of a full-scale zombie outbreak.
The big swerve is that Anling’s been bitten. In the playable demo on the E3 show floor, the meter that tracks the progress of her infection sits on top of the screen at all times, and is always ticking down. You can temporarily slow down the infection with medication, but you cannot cure it. Undying will end with Anling’s death, one way or the other.
The goal of the game isn’t to win through and find a safe harbor for Anling and Cody, but instead, to try and make sure Cody has the tools and knowledge to get by on his own once Anling’s out of the picture. You only have so much time, and so many resources, to accomplish that before Anling turns. It’s a bit like the original Dead Rising that way, where any given run has a built-in time limit, and it’s up to you to do as much as you can before it expires.
The basic mechanics will be familiar to you if you’ve played any recent survival game. Anling, with Cody in tow, can search her environment for useful items, such as metal scraps, bullet casings, food, and water. This much is basic stuff, where any random bit of trash you pick up has a potential use in some schematic or another. It’s a lot easier to find tainted water than drinkable stuff, for example, but you can use a couple of discarded comic books as an improvised water filter to strain out the impurities.
Notably, you don’t just escort Cody. He’s a fairly typical kid at the start of the game and follows you around, but part of the point of the game is to teach him how to defend himself, until he gets to the point where he’s a full-fledged AI partner. In addition to managing your typical hunger and thirst levels, you also need to keep an eye on Cody’s happiness. You can cheer him up and keep him motivated with a couple of comics or some candy, but if you let it drop too low, he won’t listen.
Undying’s zombies are distinctly in the Romero vein, slow-moving shamblers that are only really dangerous in numbers, but even with a gun or a decent melee weapon, Anling isn’t great in a fight. You’re better off evading and outrunning the zombies than fighting them. They’re easy enough to lose around corners, or get hung up on the far side of obstacles, but every second you’re using on zombie evasion is another second off the rest of Anling’s life. Again, much like Dead Rising, Undying is a game where the actual enemies are simply running interference for the clock.
The goal in the E3 floor demo was to find some weapons so Cody could learn how to defend himself. After a successful run through downtown, where I found some food and spare parts, I visited the local survivors’ camp and was able to salvage a couple of broken handguns from their trash. I repaired them at a workbench with some metal scraps, and could then hand one to Cody. Once equipped, he obediently shot up a handful of targets in the campground, gradually becoming more familiar and comfortable with his new gun. That achieved one of Anling’s early goals, by teaching Cody some basic self-defense, which in turn means he’ll help fight back against zombies.
The next major goal, making some medicine to hold back Anling’s infection, was a tougher sell. I’d found one half of the ingredients already, a plastic bubble pack full of sedatives, but I needed antibiotics. To get them, I’d have to visit one of the most dangerous places nearby, an overrun part of the city. There were several places like it on the world map, labeled as lethal, where the salvage was likely to be better than the penny-ante gear I’d been finding, but I was also likely to have to fight my way in with a young boy in tow.
In play, I didn’t feel like Undying did much that I hadn’t seen before in other survival games, particularly since every second game at this year’s E3 made sure to include some degree of crafting mechanic. What set it apart, though, was the soft pressure exerted by Anling’s infection. Even while I was just screwing around at workbenches, or exploring a safe area in search of items I could loot, it was always there and always ticking down. Without that meter, Undying would be a run-of-the-mill, almost boring zombie survival game; with it, there’s a constant undercurrent of tension.
The E3 build also had a handful of irritating issues that I was told would be worked on before the game came out. It’s got an okay translation that’s still clearly a work in progress, for example, and your inventory fills up very easily. You can use Cody as a pack mule, but have to constantly shift items between his inventory and Anling’s, which gets old quickly. It’s also got that old-school survival horror logic where a single bullet casing takes up as much room in your pack as a pistol, or a pint of water.
Undying, created by the Beijing-based studio Vanimals, is currently scheduled to enter Steam Early Access in early 2020, with plans to bring it to consoles eventually.