Knights of the Cardboard Castle

The premise and setup of this game intrigued me so it was on my watchlist from quite early on. It’s a zombie survival game but the main game interface is set up to resemble a diary. As events happen, more entries appear in the diary. There are three game modes so far, which roughly correspond to three different difficulty levels. Thoughts:

• The diary gimmick ultimately fails. There is some novelty value at first in reading all of the diary entries but after reading the same lines over and over again, you quickly learn to skip them. Your survivors kill hundreds of zombies over the course of a game. Do you really want to read that so-and-so bashed a zombie’s head in with a baseball bat dozens and dozens of times? From a game production perspective, it’s clear that doing it this saves the team from needing to create too many art assets. But I quickly found myself wishing for a more familiar, conventional interface.

• The diary format is particularly annoying in that you can’t filter entries by type. What if I want to view only clue-type entries and don’t need to read all of the combat entries? You can’t do that. You can set up bookmarks for specific pages. But when you need to get back to the most recent page, you actually need to flip each page one by one. There’s not even a jump to most recent entry feature. Other parts of the interface are obtuse. For example, if you want to send someone to breach a location, they are first set to go investigate that location. Then you need to click on the investigate action to alter it to breach. Another thing is that you’ll likely spend most of your time on the map screen, and yet you can’t advance time on that screen. You need to put away the map and go back to the diary screen to do that.

• Many people have complained that this game is unreasonably difficult. It certainly seems to me that the difficulty has been tuned so as to ensure that most games end in failure whereas most other games certainly try to have players end up succeeding. Luck plays a huge role in this game. If you’re lucky you might start out in a house that holds a crucial clue that you need to achieve the victory condition. If you’re not, you might end up searching a dozen buildings and still not find what you need. I also think it’s possible to be screwed right from the beginning. If you start the game with a group full of musicians and artists (as opposed to police officers and firefighters), your combat power is practically nil and there’s not much that you can do about it.
• That said, the game mechanics are rock solid. I like the diverse skills and items available. Doctors can heal, carpenters can build barricades and traps, cooks can cook, musicians can play music to inspire the others and distract zombies and so forth. There are a good variety of strategies to go for. For example, instead of assaulting a place to whittle down zombie numbers, you can also create a huge bonfire in another location to draw most of the zombies away. You can also snipe zombies from afar. The effectiveness of various items needs to be balanced against their weight and the noise they make. And of course, characters with good engineering skills can modify items to make them even better.
• One element that sets this game apart is that managing the relationships between characters is just as important, if not more so, as managing logistics and combat strategies. Each character has a name, profession and a background. They may have prejudices that make them dislike other characters. Put characters who like each other on the same job, and they have outstanding performance. Put two people who hate each others’ guts on the same job and they may kill each other before the zombies do. It’s a bit like playing The Sims I guess. The game has a rumour mechanic which you may use once per day to influence relationships and of course characters who feel safe, have plenty of food and have access to clean showers and beds aren’t so bad tempered. But if your whole group hates each other and have crap skills, you should seriously consider just giving up on this session.

• The last game mode, Deadline, in which your survivors must make it to the rescue chopper before the time limit, is supposedly the hardest. Road Kill, in which you have an unlimited amount of time to locate a vehicle in the town and repair it before driving away, is considered normal difficulty. But I found Deadline to be much easier. You’re supposed to go around town collecting clues on when and where the chopper will show up. And apparently you can find a radio and the correct radio frequency to communicate with the chopper. But in my case, I discovered where the chopper was going to be and just hung around nearby until the survivors heard it coming. Then I had them make a mad dash for the landing zone, ensuring of course that they had enough combat power to go through the zombies. I made it to the chopper with all five survivors alive.
• Roadkill I found to be pretty impossible. You need to locate the vehicle itself and several spare parts needed to repair it. Chances are the vehicle is in one of those huge zombie-infested buildings that take a ton of resources to storm and is pretty impossible to defend for long. Repairing the vehicle itself takes time of course. Plus you also need to locate a map before you can drive it. Sure, you theoretically have unlimited time. But in practice, due to the finite amount of food and ammunition in town and the fact that zombie numbers keep increasing over time, you pretty much need to do all this within the first week or it won’t be happening.

Overall I found this to be just an okay game that is let down by its poor interface and how heavily outcomes are determined by the random number generator. I’m also sad to say that while this game has its good points, I still think something like the popular Rebuild flash game to be more fun and of course, that one is free. As for paid games, I think the upcoming Project Zomboid is going to outshine this one in every way. Sorry, there are just too many good zombies games now and this one just doesn’t stack up.