Organ Trail: Director's Cut

This game is a pretty recent find for me, but it's so good it deserves more than a blurb.  Organ Trail began life as a Flash game designed after The Oregon Trail, except this time the setting was changed to the zombie apocalypse.  After a successful Kickstarter campaign, Organ Trail: Director's Cut came into being.  Released as a commercial product on Steam, iOS and Android, it is designed not just to be a simple conversion of The Oregon Trail, but a unique game in its own right, one that would take the basic mechanics of the beloved educational title but add in additional content to flesh out the idea of traveling cross-country to seek shelter from the zombie hoards.  No longer a face-lift, it is now a unique take on the survival-horror genre.

The game is designed in a beautiful and clever retro-style that avoids being cute.  It brings back memories of older horror games, where despite the limitations of graphical and sound hardware designers tried hard to use what elements they had available to create a bleak and frightening environment. The game has a sense of humor, but ultimately the visual and musical cues keep the setting dark and bleak, and it really works.

The gameplay is also varied.  You start out with a quick introduction to your circumstances, receive four traveling companions and assigned several points that you can apply to different parts of your inventory.  There are several supplies that you will need, parts to repair your aging station wagon, food, ammunition, fuel, etc., and you will never have enough. Do you take along a spare muffler, or extra food?  On the one hand, if your muffler breaks, the resulting noise will draw more zombies to you, which will be a problem when you have to stop. On the other hand, if you don't have enough food, you'll have to scavenge for it on foot, which means braving whatever is lurking outside.  No matter what decisions you make, you will never have enough, and it makes the game feel very tense as you struggle to keep your party alive.  Zombies will attack, people will get sick, and then what?  A sick companion can slow you down and drain extra supplies; do you attempt to nurse them back to health, or shoot them and keep moving?  Both options have advantages.

Along the road you'll come to towns and settlements where you can buy and sell supplies, talk to the locals, trade, and even take on mercenary jobs, whether defending the town from zombies or agreeing to help fight off a local gang.  These challenges can put a quick end to your adventure, but they also have rewards in the form of cash payouts, which you can use to buy extra supplies or upgrades to your car that will make your journey easier.

There are numerous mini-games that have you fighting the zombies, evading street gangs and scavenging for supplies, and "pick your poison" decisions that you'll have to make in order to survive.  Survival is not easy...this is not a game you can complete in an hour, the trek across the country is long, and the longer your survive, the more you'll find yourself struggling to keep going.

There is also an expansion pack for the game that includes an "endless" survival mode where your journey continues until you die and adds extra events and minigames.

All in all, if you enjoy zombies, survival-horror and/or have fond memories of playing a certain education title, Organ Trail: Director's Cut is for you.