Winter: The harshest of the four seasons. We stay locked inside, venturing out as little as possible, huddled close to each other for warmth. The bright, colorful world of the other seasons is reduced to a dead grey-scale wasteland almost entirely devoid of resources and people. Most only venture out from the safety and warmth of their houses for the most basic of necessities such as food or an occupation. You could almost think of winter as your personal zombie apocalypse trainer.
A similar zombie apocalypse trainer is Project Zomboid on Steam. One of the many, innumerable Green Light games on Steam now-a-days, Project Zomboid started out as a small project on a humble site. The developers, with the help of their community, managed to push the project through Green Light and onto the Steam distribution platform. While far from completed, the game receives semi-frequent updates which remove bugs, add content, and polish the overall game. (The newest version boasting an online mode for the, up to this point, single-player experience.)
In Project Zomboid, you navigate your survivor through one of the two fictional cities set in the game. You are given no goal other that simply surviving and tossed out onto your feet with hardly a hint on how to do so (the tutorial is on the 'Coming Soon...' feature list). The most obvious solution is to pick up the nearest blunt object, and go from door to door smashing through houses, taking out zombies one or two at a time, and dragging fists full of food back to your home base to eat later. This becomes complicated as the needs of your survivor (ranging from hunger, thirst, boredom, fatigue, and even happiness to name a few), start to wear down. Soon you'll be grabbing nearly anything that could potentially be useful, pulling it back to your base, storing it away for safe keeping.
In the middle of the night, your survivor wakes up to the sounds of gunshots. Zombies have swarmed towards the sounds and you can hear dozens of them clawing past your house. The next day the power system fails and the food in your fridge begins to spoil. Days after that, the water stops running, leaving you without that source of nigh-unlimited thirst-quenching water that you used to take for granted nearly every day. As time progresses in game, the world begins to collapse around your survivor; gunshots and helicopters attract herds of zombies that could break through your meager defenses, the simplest of life's amenities disappear, and food and water become more and more scarce as you struggle to feed yourself.
While the game is still being developed, my initial run-in with the game impressed me greatly. Long ago, during a much more primitive build of the game, my survivor was held up in a house with his wife, hiding from the hoard of zombies on the streets outside. Sneaking out of the house, he ran down to the dinner to pick up supplies, slinking back into house undetected. Using a can opener on a can of stew and using the basic crafting system to empty the can into a cooking pot, I set the supper on the stove to cook and went up-stairs when the wife called. A radio we had salvaged was talking about evacuation attempts and we discussed the situation. A few minutes later, smoke started pouring from the lower level and a smoke alarm was blaring in the dead of the night.
I directed the survivor downstairs, realizing I'd forgotten about the supper on the stove. The house had caught fire due to my neglect of sense. Worse yet, the zombies, attracted by the smoke alarm screaming in the otherwise quiet night, began bashing at any window or door they could reach. The house on fire, surrounded by zombies, and unable to handle the situation I had to evacuate the building into the raining night, leaving my survivor's wife behind to either be burned or eaten alive. I was astonished as I closed the game; the events that had occurred weren't directly scripted. Had I turned the stove off, or attended to the pot more carefully, the fire certainly wouldn't have started, causing things to spiral out of control. I was astonished at the level of detail the game had in its mechanics.
While the game has a great deal to go before it's "finished", there's a great deal of potential for Project Zomboid. The game already feels excellent with row upon row of empty houses lending a terrible sense of loneliness and hopelessness to the moody and tense soundtrack. A robust crafting system even lets you cut down trees and forests to assemble a hand-crafted fortresses against the zombie threat. In the current state, Project Zomboid is pretty unpolished, but there is a sense of constant discovery as you work your way through each day. Every door you open is simultaneously exciting and terrifying as you can never quite guess how things will go. While the game may not be for everyone, there is a free demo for the game that couldn't hurt to try. After all, on these long winter days, you might as well prepare for the coming zombie apocalypse anyways.