The Killing Antidote

[Grogan]

I was bored and looking through the Steam catalogue and this game caught my eye. It's still Early Access, but I was reading good things about it.

It's an Unreal Engine 4 game, indy devs from China. The dialog is in Chinese with English subtitles and most of the signs and stuff are in English. A typical zombie virus scenario, which looks so far like a lab accident rapidly losing containment.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2254 ... _Antidote/

The protagonist is a Chinese girl, very pretty (which didn't hurt when making my decision lol), with westernized eyes. They made her all cutesy on purpose, with a bit of bum jiggle when she walks, even. A part of this game is dress up, there are all kinds of different outfits and hairdo's and stuff I don't care about. The character looks good in the default jeans and leather coat. When you pick them up it automatically changes them by default (I turned that off). For example I picked something up last night and she was wearing pink stretchy pants. There are all kinds of mods for this game too (though they'll get broken with every update at this time).

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Decent splatter too. It's hard to get an action shot, but the last one is chopping an infected employee in the head with an axe. I don't have any guns yet, though I have picked up ammo. Actually I lost everything I did last night, there are only autosaves. I don't have the ammo anymore. They will have to add more save points.

So far, the main objective is to find my way through things. Find key cards for doors, vents to crawl through, fight or avoid enemies etc. but I haven't gotten far enough to expose more of the story.

[Zema Bus]

Looks and sounds good!

[Grogan]

It's better than I thought. I WOULD have had a pistol, but I didn't notice a number on the wall behind a locker with the combination to the pad. It wasn't written on the wall, it was a number on the wall that looked like a department number or something.

I also could have saved, had I known that the beds were interactive. I'd been in a few rooms with beds, but I thought they were only for the stash crate that saves your clothing and lets you store things. Also, your pistol is the key to locked doors (only the wooden ones though, not steel).

Now I have to find a shower, to wash off all the infected zombie puke and blood. I can imagine something is about to go awry while I'm in the shower. I'll probably get swarmed or something lol

[Grogan]

So it wasn't as simple as taking a shower. When I finally found it, there was no water. I had to go find the pumps and turn them on, and a wheel to use to turn the water valve. Then, I found that mutants destroyed my route, a shelf rack that I used to climb up to get to the level with the shower. I had to go to the upper floor and find a hole in the floor to drop down and fight a bunch of zombies along the way.

So finally I'm in the shower, she's all luxuriating in it and... a big mutant monster breaks through the wall and knocks me down. I just knew something was going to happen, nobody takes a shower in a zombie apocalypse lol

I then had to RUN, with no gear, naked with a towel wrapped around me, without a clue where I was supposed to run to. I finally found a vent to crawl through. After that, I had to navigate a lot of zombies with no weapons. Avoid them, turn the corner, try to slip past them (taking a lot of damage in the process) until I found a bow and arrow in a locker. Then there were soldiers shooting everyone still living, to contain the damage and scandal. I shot one and took his assault rifle and then eliminated them all. I got hundreds of ammo for it from pickups and drops from killed enemies.

Then the game took away all my gear AGAIN (I think I got attacked and fell through a hole if I recall). There was a pistol in a room I couldn't get in because the door was busted and crates were in the way. I had to use the one grenade I'd found to bust the wall on the other side of it.

The objective was now to get back to the showers and retrieve my backpack with all my gear. That was a difficult route to find, requiring key cards and stuff. Then I started to find briefcases that use a hacking tool to deduce the combination (that I had to find in a locker). When you get a number right (usually there's a clue somewhere in the room to get started) you click a button and the numbers that are correct go green. You have a limited number of trials with this hacking tool. There's around $500 in each one. A bit further in there was a vending machine that resets its inventory every 3 minutes. I had a few thousand dollars at that point to buy guns, grenades and most importantly, I needed a mine to throw and stick on a wall to progress.

Instead of waiting 3 minutes or paying $50 to refresh the store inventory, I used a near by bed to save and reload to keep refreshing the store's inventory until I had everything I wanted (It took several tries to see a sticky mine).

So that's the game, in a nutshell. Now that I know autosaves are few and far between (I lost a lot of progress once because I fell down a shaft of broken stair flights) I'm making sure to find a bed (even backtrack) to save after unlocking/accomplishing things. It's a pretty good game, though the traversal can be frustrating.