So recently I’ve really gotten back into computer gaming, especially with the release of the new 7 Days to Die build. For anyone unfamiliar with the title, 7 Days is a game in which you, and perhaps some friends, attempt to survive in a random or pre-generated world full of zombies. I’ll admit that this one scratches my survival itch a lot more than Minecraft ever did, without being, more or less, focused on PvP like DayZ or Rust. So it’s co-op, huzzah! The game allows you to modify structures you find in the world to make them more suitable, or build an entirely new one from scratch. I find converting buildings to be more fun. It takes less time and makes it feel more like a proper zombie apocalypse.

Every character has hunger, thirst and temperature, all of which have to be regulated or you will die. Early game this has meant scavenging through buildings, with the pack at our heels, looking for tins of soup and dog food. Killing zombies can also be quite fruitful once you get the hang of it. Though by far the best way we found of getting food was farming. We set up shop in a small fishing hut next to a lake. The choice was obvious for us when we came across it. An easy supply of water, a building made of metal. It also has the added bonus of an easy escape; zombies can’t swim you see, but we can. Usually in the game, zombies walk during the day and run at night. We didn’t really like this feature, though I can see why some people would. So instead the options menu allowed us to make them walk all the time. To counteract this obvious plummet in difficulty, we increased the amount of zombies that spawn at all times by fifty-percent. Hordes became much more horde-like.

We fortified our shack the best we could; surrounded it with spikes, made murder holes, etc. We also built a barn next to it to act as a sort of storage building, seen as the fishing hut was quickly filling up with crates full of assorted loot. I have a friend who likes to think he’s a quartermaster and so spends a lot of time rearranging and organising all the loot. The storage barn was a godsend to him.  After this my brother spent sometime digging a trench around the buildings, so that any errant zombies coming in would fall and we could get rid of them at our leisure. However we didn’t realise that when a zombie is killed, after a certain amount of time the ragdoll body turns itself into a sort of in-world gore block, therefore allowing other zombies to walk across it. Our pit quickly filled with gore and before long any swarms that came were clambering across the pit and out the other side, using the previous corpses as a ladder. We soon figured out what was going on and sorted it, but I thought that was a really cool feature. It means we can’t ever be truly safe to do whatever we want; defences will always need checking and maintaining.

During this time of preparation and armament we also spread out around the lake looking and exploring further. Up the road was a bit of an abandoned house, though there was little of value in it. We decided at some point however we’d reinforce that building. Down the road was a sort of logging camp with large tents. We robbed that of anything good. With time ticking on however day 7 was almost upon us. This is where the titular meaning of the game comes from. Every 7th day in game, a huge horde comes, swarming your defences, eating your friends and destroying your home. It’s the best part of the game. I stood in our barn shooting arrows at the oncoming horde. Many of them fell onto the spikes that we had laid, but the majority came on unhindered. They fell into the trench my brother had built and we thought we had them. Low behold no. They shuffled out the other side and we into the camp proper. Several of us ran into the fishing hut and stabbed and shot through murder holes, but that was to no avail. They soon pushed their way in and ate everyone. One cool feature I noticed though at this moment was that when the zombies killed people, they spent quite a while on all fours feasting on their flesh. The few of us in the barn used this to our advantage. While they ate our friends’ remains, we crouched, entering stealth mode, and gently crept out of the barn. Moving from rock to rock and crate to crate we slowly left our base and headed up the road to the abandoned building I mentioned earlier. We waited out the storm there, along with other people coming, having respawn after being eaten at the camp. The sun dawned on day 8 and we headed back to our camp. A few remaining zombies were loitering and we dispatched them but the horde had moved on for the most part. The camp was a wreck. Corpses piled high everywhere, defences destroyed, buildings damaged. We set about the repair work. Only 7 days left till the next horde.
All in all 7 Days is one of the most rewarding co-op experiences I’ve had on the PC in a long time and I’d heartily recommend it to anyone. Game on pals.