Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

This is the greatest post-apocalyptic survival game ever made. It's certainly the most verisimilitudinous, to adapt a word the devs (a core team of about a dozen, with thousands of volunteer contributors) often use when describing their work. Cataclysm: DDA takes place in present day New England in the American north-east, at the start of a snowballing series of apocalypses that progress as time passes. If you ever daydreamed of what YOU would do in a zombie apocalypse, imagine no longer.

As a tile- and turn-based game - a traditional roguelike - Cataclysm is visually a little more abstract, quite tactical, and leans on the Nethack-esque "kitchen sink" ideal, where almost anything can be done to any item. Emergent gameplay is at the heart of the game. Here's a possible starting scenario: awaken drunk and injured in the middle of the city, get chased by zombies onto the roof of your neighbor's house, wait for nightfall and use the last dregs of your lighter to light the roof appliances on fire, watch as the fire spreads and the zombies burn, and then escape down the drainpipe in the shadows before the fire consumes you as well! As a roguelike game, death within the first few turns is possible, and should even be expected! But C:DDA is a survival game, so longevity is just as much a focus as immediate survival.

Because of the work of thousands of volunteers, C:DDA boasts the most extensive list of features of almost any survival game out there, with an endless procedurally-generated world, robust crafting system with substitutes and raw crafting options at most steps, "main line" quests that don't gate off entire sections of the game, gun modding, and powerful and horrifying mutations. There's also many, many officially-supported mods: a full magic mod, dinosaurs and ancient flora/fauna, bionics, and multiple total conversion mods like one that takes place in the wilderness (Innawood), a static map that never changes from game to game (the MA Massachusetts mod), and one where the player is hopelessly lost in The Backrooms. C:DDA has some of the most complete documentation of any game I've ever seen. The community encourages contributors and modders, and is all the better for it!

To avoid rattling off another list of features, let me just describe my longest-lived character. I randomly rolled Riley Hoffman into existence in the character creator, a helicopter pilot with above-average intelligence and below-average cooking skills. I used the last few gallons of gas in my chopper to fly to a small town I could see nearby. I spent weeks slowly clearing the town of enemies - zombies, aliens, abnormally large insects, wild animals - and scoured the environment for tools to soup up an abandoned APC I found on the edge of town, eventually making a vehicle I could trust to get me inside the nearby military base and get even more weapons. Unfortunately, along the way I spent three weeks healing after I was pummeled by a zombie and broke both my arms, accidentally ingested mutagen which began turning me into a frog-man (the positive being powerful legs, the negative being an extremely intense thirst for water at all times), and got lost in the wilderness for a week after my car slipped off the road and crashed. Now, nearly 9 in-game months and ~30 play hours after game start, I've learned enough to manufacture my own biodiesel for my helicopter, found bionics that can turn me into Iron Man for about 30-40 seconds, and have begun experimenting by mutating my hapless NPC followers. I have thousands of rounds of ammo, dozens of military guns, grenades, molotov cocktails, flashbangs, homemade pipe bombs, and a custom-tailored feline fursuit lined with kevlar that keeps me very warm in the winter :3

The game Project Zomboid contains a reference to this game, and I find it hard to mention one without the other. Both are incredible games. Zomboid has the benefit of a multiplayer, real-time engine, great zombie swarm mechanics, and an incredibly evocative setting/mood. However, C:DDA's simulation is soooo much more varied and satisfying, and exploration yields much more surprising results. I always end up coming back to this game for novel and challenging experiences, and since the community develops it so quickly, I'm never disappointed.