DayZ underscores the danger humanity presents in a zombie apocalypse, but Sandswept Studio's The Dead Linger wants to remind everyone that walking corpses are still Very Scary Things. Where and how you bump into the undead plays an important role in tossing a little panic into your adventures, and the game's most recent major update for its alpha testers includes a perfect venue for thrillseeking survivalists: the claustrophobia-causing cell rows of a pitch-black prison.
"The zombie genre has died," Sandswept states on its official website . "We're bringing it back from the dead." The supposed revival involves closely following DayZ's formula of an expansive open world populated with items, structures, zombies, and other players. As in similar post-apocalyptic games, banding together is a necessity for staying alive, though it looks like Linger's emphasis rests with eluding and plowing through undead instead of avoiding cutthroat bandits a la DayZ.
A glimpse at Linger's wiki shows a number of ambitious features in the works: procedurally generated maps stretching up to a whopping 64,000 square kilometers (DayZ's Chernarus is 265 square kilometers), driveable vehicles, a crafting system, and barricades. Sandswept doesn't yet have a solid roadmap for rolling out the rest of its plans, but it should definitely have a solid grasp of the pitfalls associated with over-committing .
You can access The Dead Linger's alpha by pre-ordering the game for $20 on Sandswept's website .
