Head Full Of Zombi

1948. Post-war England. Something is buried under Holy Island.

They call it The Eye. It turns prisoners, monks and guards into flesh-eating ghouls.

Technology fails. The island goes dark.

Your helicopter comes down on the lighthouse. Your supplies are scattered across the island. The hordes are already climbing.

Survive or be consumed.

Thirty seconds from icon to first kill

A ten-second intro, skippable. Then you are on top of the lighthouse with the dead coming up the stairs. No menus to wade through, no tutorial, no long walk to the action. Every level drops you straight into a fight.

The loop

You arrive in an area and the horde is already moving toward you.

• Fight with what the level gives you — exploding barrels, claymores, grenades,choke points, high ground. Position matters as much as aim.

• Scavenge as you go — ammo, weapons and food are scattered through the level, never handed to you. Eat to heal, and keep eating to push your maximum health higher.

• Find the key — somewhere near the end of the wave, one zombie is carrying it. Kill it, open the gate, move on.

• Die and the level restarts — no checkpoint trickle, no attrition. You take the level again, and you take it better.

Ten levels, escalating. Lighthouse, snowy forest, mansion, cathedral, prison, sewers, castle, and more.

The horde

• Boomers — charge ahead of the pack and detonate.

• Armoured — pots, birdcages, gramophones and pig masks strapped to their heads. Shots to the skull ring off them. Go for the body, or take the helmet off first.

• Crawlers — legless, low, sometimes gushing blood, easy to miss in a crowd.

• Sleepers — lying among the dead until you walk past.

• Eaters — feeding on corpses. Some notice you. Some don't.

• Bat carriers — pick up weapons off the level and swing them at you.

• Gunners — pick up firearms and shoot back.

• Barrel throwers — pick up explosive barrels and throw them.

• The horde itself — thousands on screen at once, flocking mindlessly.

Every zombie can be dismembered in twelve places, decapitated, burned or blown apart. Bodies, heads and props combine into more than 70,000 distinct zombies in the first level alone. You will not see the same corpse twice.

The arsenal

Seven firearms, grenades, claymores, and every explosive barrel the level happens to be

storing. Melee weapons are in development — chainsaw, boat hooks, bell clappers.

A real island

Levels are built on the actual geography of Lindisfarne: the ruined priory, the castle on its volcanic crag, the Victorian lime kilns, the upturned herring-boat sheds, and the tidal causeway that floods twice a day.

The Eye is sealed beneath Emmanuel Head — the White Pyramid, one of the earliest daymarks in Britain, standing on that headland since 1810. It was never really built for ships. It was built to contain The Eye.

Soundtrack

An original giallo score in the Goblin tradition, written for the game by Lars Berry of Colourdomes and Future Proof Records. Analogue, nasty, and entirely period.

What this is not

No puzzles. No co-op. No base building. No crafting trees. No waiting around.

Doom's pacing with Dead Rising's density, made by someone who has been building zombie games since the Amiga.

At a glance

• Genre — single-player first-person shooter, horror

• Length — 5 to 7 hours across 10 levels

• Difficulty — hard, and honest about it. Death restarts the level.

• Players — single player only

• Platform — PC, with Steam Deck support planned