Zafehouse: Diaries is a tactical game of survival, planning, resource management and problem-solving. Stuck in a remote, abandoned town, you must lead five survivors with conflicting motivations, fragile relationships and fiery prejudices to safety from the roving undead. A sophisticated procedural engine generates new survivors, towns and content so every adventure is a different experience, and you can use built-in editors to add real people and locations to the game. Zafehouse: Diaries uses a unique, diary-based interface. It records your actions, reveals the state of the world, provides hints and clues to help you, and can be exported and shared when the game is over.
The game is a very engaging one. I enjoyed the diary style of game progression. It needs refining and bug fixes. But overall there is a great game here for people who aren't hung up on graphics.
a bit expensive for what it is, good indy small game
Genius game, goes beyond the ideal of mindless zombie killing, adds in aspects of psychological teamwork and a sense of real danger.
Take a group of survivors. Give them their own set of skills, background, and motivations. Sprinkle in some prejudices (or outright hatreds). Shake it up and throw in a zombie apocalypse. This is what you get with Zafehouse Diaries.
Told from the perspective of diary entries, you make decisions, hour by hour, in an attempt to survive long enough to win. Two game modes offer variety by giving you variable win conditions. Since you are never given the same set of survivors (each having a random job, age, background, and skillset) it offers quite a bit of replayability.
This game is tough. You will rarely win. You will grow to love and hate your survivors, and you will never have enough of anything. That is what makes the tension in this game so enjoyable. You never know what will happen next and each location you secure or assault may lead to game over. Check it out if you are a fan of anything zombie!
Unforgiving and lacking a tutorial of any sort makes this game hard to enjoy for long.
This is a real funny tactical and strategic game. I have only a few proposals for a maybe planned 2nd version of this game:
1. Add some graphical scenes for most important happenings.
2. Add some goals or at least 1 important goal for the easy version of this game like in the normal version of this game, where you have to repair a car to get out of the town.
3. It would be nice to add some other professions like Salesman, Farmer, housewife (and man) or something like that. A wider variety of professions would be a good idea for this game.
So this is an excellent, funny and exciting game which might be even better if some minor improvements would be done.
Great game, little rough around the edges, but over all, it provides a realistic experience of a zombie apocolapse.
A good game if you enjoy zombies and are not hung up on graphics. Zafehouse: Diaries could use a lot more variety in several aspects though, such as the NPC interactions currently being too repetative; there needs to be more emotional engagement, not just between the surviors but with the player and the characters being managed. Relationships or old/new friendships, for example, could provide large and lasting bonuses between two people and could even be taken a step further to include marriage depending on whether a priest is part of the group. Things like that could be used as random events that include both your survivors interacting between each other and with other various issues both good and bad that can happen in the zombie apocalypse; a bit of creativity and variety using drama, violence and love managed to get quite a lot of attention towards The Walking Dead comics, TV series and games.
An increase in the writing for every action that is done would be a welcome change, reading the same things constantly can get quite dull. One way to make things more interesting would be to take survivors personalities into account to change the way the diary is written so that it appears as if one of the survivors is writing the diary, then if this particular character dies, someone else picks up where the last character left off which then changes the perspective and therefore creates variety. Besides the things I just mentioned I can only think of some smaller issues I have with the game like the lack of an intuitive equipment screen for the player to choose whether a character can auto select equipment for every action as it already is in game or whether certain survivors can equip particular items constantly until otherwise specified. Doing this in a style similar to inventory/equipment screens in RPG games would be fantastic, in my opinion.
Anyway, sorry to have rambled! I wish the Devs the best of luck with their game, I'm sure it is in good hands.
This game have a lot of potential, right now I would say that the main problem is the amount of text used to give the user information, I'm definitely fine with the diary, but other things inside the game could be represented with images, icons or bars.
It is what it is. A great game that could use a few minor improvements.