The Haunted Hoard: Zombie Incident (3DS)

When I was younger and I played games like Final Fantasy, I liked to imagine that even when I was slaying the most minor of monsters, I was bettering the game’s world by freeing them of such dangerous creatures. Of course, those games had infinitely reappearing monsters and this was just a flight of fantasy, but surprisingly enough, Zombie Incident manages to tap into that old imagined concept as the main goal of its adventure.

Originally developed in 2011 as an MSX game for a competition, Zombie Incident moves it from the long dead console to something more modern players can access and play. The titular Zombie Incident is enacted as a punishment to Hamartia, a citadel that had devolved into a den of hedonism. There isn’t much to this setup though since even with the more complete ending of the two available you won’t find any answers on what caused the incident, but this is what inspires the game’s protagonist to plunge into the zombie-filled castle. Much more squat than the game’s eShop art would imply, Nana must find eight stars in this citadel while also trying to wipe out every creature she encounters along the way, the only means she has for doing so being to jump on top of them.

The map of Hamartia is contained on the 3DS’s bottom screen, with every square of the 8 by 8 map representing a room that you not only need to navigate your way through to find the eight stars, but must also clear of every single shambling creature. Nana is up for the task at least, packing a wall jump that will let her get up the more vertical climbs found along the way and environmental hazards like spikes and green water only damaging her instead of outright killing her. Nana even comes with a fairly large health bar at the start of the game, but there are no expansions to it, meaning she’ll have to scrounge up health through clearing a room and getting the healing bonus it grants. Holding off on clearing a room can end up being a smart tactic because you might need that heal later, but it’s also vital to defeat all the enemies to open up the side rooms where you can save your progress or find one of the valuable stars.

Perhaps the most important element of defeating a room of enemies though is feeding into the level up system. When the game begins, Nana’s jumps can only hurt the weakest of the weak, but as she kills more zombies and monstrous creatures, she’ll increase in strength. The power of an enemy is indicated by their coloration, and while they aren’t really directly aggressive so much as patrolling areas you need to move through or reacting to your presence by changing their routes, you will likely get hurt by many of them as you try to kill them to clear out Hamartia. There are no boss monsters or even ones that really push the limits beyond moving in ways that match their design like flying birds moving back and forth and spiders moving up and down on a strand of silk, but the layouts of the rooms often make hopping onto their heads to hurt them a challenge. Mistiming a jump can lead to you being the one hit, and many rooms are packed with enemies that might overlap and hurt you while you’re going for another. This ensures that Zombie Incident isn’t too easy, but there are quite a few flaws with this system that slow the experience down into something quite tedious.

The colors of your enemies don’t just indicate what level you need to be to even hurt them. Every level of coloration comes with another required hit to eliminate them. Even early enemies have a skeleton form underneath their basic green layer, meaning you have to hit every foe at least twice to kill them. However, since your level can go all the way up to 7, the late game enemies require a lot of repeated generic attacks to break through all their layers, and you can’t just bounce on the head over and over since they poof into dust briefly to move down to the next color on the ladder. If you don’t hit them in a set amount of time as well, they’ll upgrade back up a color, undoing a small bit of your progress. If your enemy is out in the open, stuck to the ground, or moves in a predictable pattern, this takes time but isn’t too bothersome, but enemies such as the flying ones will actively move away from you if you try and wait for them to approach, and some areas feature hazards very close to an enemy to make you have to take your time and set up the attacks with small windows for success. Sometimes, just having a low ceiling can make a room frustrating, as you might have the bird enemy who avoids you with very little clearance above it to even leap on it when you’ve caught it, the risk for it to hit you or heal back up making the confrontation tedious. There is definitely some satisfaction in seeing the defeated zombie counter on the bottom screen go up, the player assured they are truly clearing out this place as they see the enemies aren’t respawning, but the many annoyingly placed enemies along the way with the slow elimination methods makes some rooms feel more like a chore.

The level up system also leads to some back tracking, as you’ll find unbeatable enemies well before you can be the right level to handle them, but the map connects in enough ways to make navigation not too much of a bother. Even secret paths are easy enough to suss out, but there is one hiccup in going between screens. Every room transition is a cut from one design to another, meaning you have no way of peeking into the upcoming room save by throwing Nana into it. This can mean Nana walks or leaps right into danger, and there are quite a few cases where you are expected to make a blind leap up or down and the enemies are placed to hurt you before you knew they even existed. This is partly why the big health bar isn’t as generous a safety net as it first seems, but the reliability of room clearing rewarding you by healing you up can counteract those moments of unexpected damage at least.

Despite the constant waiting for enemies to poof to their lower color so you can bop them again, Zombie Incident is a short game overall. Sadly, a lot of that is the padding enforced by having to slowly clear out rooms, and that unfortunately shows the tedium of such a concept as full eradication of the enemy force. There is a bad ending available for impatient players who want to scoot out of the citadel once they’ve got the stars, but getting all the stars to get there still requires a thorough exploration of the map and time spent leveling up Nana by bopping baddies. There is definitely potential for finding a mindless rhythm to much of the play, and the map even changes the room colors to tell you which areas have been cleared out so you don’t need to backtrack aimlessly in search of foes you had to pass up when you were weaker, but while I enjoyed the concept of clearing out all the zombies, the reality of the task slowly wears out its welcome.

THE VERDICT: Zombie Incident asks the player to wipe out over 200 enemies in the interconnected interior of the Hamartia citadel, but it quickly becomes clear to the player that this task is more tedious than satisfying. Most enemies take a little too long to kill and are sometimes positioned specifically to avoid the player so they can recover and take even longer to eliminate, with most enemy variety just meaning the later creatures you must kill do a better job of eating up your time. Clearing out the zombie infestation is mildly satisfying and the map helps with the task quite a bit, but the level up system comes with the price of making general play much too slow. Coupled with blind entry into rooms where you can be damaged immediately by unseen dangers, and Zombie Incident sadly can’t make its zombie extermination goal as fun as it could be.

And so, I give Zombie Incident for 3DS…

A BAD rating. I really wanted Zombie Incident to deliver on that silly fantasy I had when I was much younger, and while it did still hit some level of satisfaction when I saw that every monster had been removed from Hamartia, the path to getting there lost its luster before I got there. The need to bounce on the same enemy up to eight times, perhaps even more if they’re deviously placed to recover easily, makes encountering some room arrangements a drag and potentially even frustrating. Things start simply and hitting the same enemy two, three, or even four times doesn’t seem like much of a problem, but as the difficulty increases as you get deeper into the citadel, so do the moments where you wait around or perform the same repetitive attack pattern over and over, no enemy shaking things up in a good way. It’s pretty easy to see the cleanest way to improve Zombie Incident, that being to just have Nana’s strength truly scale so that she would eliminate weaker enemies in fewer jumps and the strong enemies would instead take only four or so hits to kill. Adjusting areas where you need to blindly jump up or drop down into potential trouble would make the health system more fair as well, because the generous amount is already challenged enough by the devious but fair instances of deadly enemy placement.

Zombie Incident involves far too much waiting and working on the same enemies to stay interesting. The process of clearing out the citadel gets very repetitive even as room design and enemy placement gets more challenging, but with that increase in proper difficulty comes with an increase in bland difficulty, with the need to do the same boring hops on the same enemy drawing out the experience. Zombie Incident had the potential to scratch a specific itch, and certain parts of its design would have fed into that extermination angle very well, but the process of cleaning out the citadel offers little thanks to the messy implementation of its core idea.