Nearly Departed: The Story of a Reluctant Zombie Demo

Although zombies are usually pictured as mindless husks walking from one place to the other, searching for brains and other people to infect, you might wonder what it would be like if some of them were conscious and aware of their condition. The game at hand presents exactly that situation, in the form of a colorful point-and-click adventure, with plenty of humor to go along with it.

Nearly Departed: The Story of a Reluctant Zombie is quite simple and straightforward, in the sense that everything about the game is intuitive and easy to understand. Your main purpose is to walk around and figure out how to get past various obstacles, using the items you happen to stumble upon along the way and a bit of logic to fit them all together.

The action starts in a cemetery, where the zombie in question rises from the grave and begins to ponder on what should he should do next. There are a number of items you can pick up and use to get out, some of which can even come in handy much later on in the story. However, you might have some trouble figuring out the interface at first, in case you skip over the tutorial. In essence, you need to hold the mouse click down for a bit over the object you are interested in, to display the available actions.

As far as the actual puzzles are concerned, they are difficult enough to require a bit of thinking, yet not very much so you get frustrated and lose interested. There is a bit of pixel hunting involved as well, but the instances are rare and you probably won’t spend too much time figuring them out. The tricky part is to understand what the overall picture tries to tell you, because everything else comes naturally.

Being a Flash game, you should not expect anything else than 2D graphics, which is not exactly a problem in this case. The bright colors and the detailed environments do manage to create the proper atmosphere most of the time. However, there is no sound or music to keep you company, so you might want to use something from your own library in order to break the silence.

Despite its apparent simplicity, Nearly Departed: The Story of a Reluctant Zombie seems to hide something from the players, something that might be revealed if one continues to play. Regardless of whether that is true or not, you can still give the game a try, if only to see how would you handle the difficult task of being a zombie.