In the zombie apocalypse, I died of cooking soup. My wife was hurt, upstairs in bed. I’d bandaged her leg as well as I could, but we both knew what an injury meant. Having found wood, hammer and nails in the garden shed I’d put up defences on all the downstairs doors and windows, and then we slept.

Incredibly hungry, I set out to find food for both of us, the bleeding in my wife’s leg just as bad. The next door house looked empty, so heading in I made my way to the kitchen and encountered my first zombie. Fortunately the hammer I’d put the wooden boards up with was still in my hand (it pays to sleep with such a thing), so I bopped it on the head and emptied the cupboards. An apple, carrots, and a few tins of soup.

Getting back to our own new home, and after in paranoia hammering up new planks over the door I went through cupboards and draws looking for a pot and tin opener. Combined, and into the oven. Time passed. Very quickly, as it happens. It seems to fly by. I wasn’t sure if it was done. Pootling around in the kitchen I thought I’d check on my wife while I waited. It was with my foot on the first stair that I saw the oven explode in the kitchen. Running in, in my panic I thought to take the pot of soup out and then ran upstairs to my wife. By this point I was on fire, as was most of the house, and my attempt to carry her out of the building was already looking futile. And then I died, about a foot from the front door.

It’s a clever technique, the appearance of a wife. It goes from “man who hits zombies to survive” to “man who needs to stay alive to help wife”. (It would certainly be no bad thing to see the introduction of a choice of sexes at the start to get away from any needless tropes here, of course.) There’s a motivation from the first opening moments, and it’s not bravado. She even warns you not to try to prove anything as you venture out for the first time. It’s the sort of evocative you just won’t believe from looking at the pictures. It’s also important to note if the thought of narrative getting in the way sounds horrendous, this isn’t obligatory. In fact, this opening part of the game is the anomaly, the rest more freeform. There are also plans for alternative narrative openings, motivations, and so on. And a tutorial skip will be added soon.

I love the potential here. And I’m excited by how much has already been achieved. The atmosphere is immediately superb, a big part thanks to the bleak presentation of what is usually associated with such bright, cheerful games. Isometric, chunky pixels feel as out of place in such a world as a smiling doll in a post-holocaust playground. It’s a smart decision. Combine that with some really quite astonishingly good music (I’m leaving it playing as I write this, and fancy writing everything else ever to it just now), intelligently gentle weather sound effects, and a sense of foreboding from one of the best opening lines I’ve ever seen, and they’re onto something. That opening line, white text on a black background before you start: “This is how you died.”

So the next time I turned the oven off. My wife was listening to the radio, and I figured I’d hunt around for a bowl or something to serve it in, rather than have her eat directly out of the pot. Turning to go back downstairs I saw the front door was open. I’d definitely shut it. But I hadn’t boarded it back up. I’d boarded it when I was next door, because she was there on her own. But I hadn’t bothered when I came back in. I was running out of wood, and I just figured I should save it for when I’m not there. And now the door was open. And there was a man with a shotgun. He shouted at me. I pulled out my hammer. He shot me dead. And he went upstairs.

Interesting. And the graphics just remind me of X-Com.