HomeFeatures7 Days To Die
7 Dos and 7 Don’ts in 7 Days To DieA sorta review
A sorta review
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / The Fun Pimps
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / The Fun Pimps
7 Days to Die - 1.0 Gameplay TrailerWatch on YouTube
7 Days to Die - 1.0 Gameplay Trailer
Don’t expect a revolution in survival game tropes
If you’ve been gaming at all in the past decade, you know how this is going to go. Hunger meters, angry mobs, inexplicable crafting logic - it’s all there, partly because this game was among the first to embrace the traditions of the genre. Yes, a lot has been added to the zombiethon during its lifetime (graphical overhauls, skill trees, moddable weapons, trading outposts) but the moment-to-moment scavenging feels the same, and the heart of the game has not truly changed. That said, it’s a stout heart…
Do embrace the nomad’s life
The core fantasy is intact. You’re here to find a home, fortify it against bitey bois, survive there for as long as you can, then inevitably lose everything to a nightmarish horde before abandoning it and moving on to the next place. 7 Days makes zombies into a form of weather, translating the post-disaster itinerancy of TV shows like The Walking Dead (from camp to farm to prison to town) into something you can play alone or with buddies. None of that is new to the game, like I say. It had the exact same appeal in 2013. But you know what? It felt good back then to travel the roads, searching for a new place to rest your bones, and it feels even better today, for reasons I’ll go into shortly.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / The Fun Pimps
Don’t worry about death
Do worry about water
And food too. Not because thirst and hunger will lead to the mild annoyance of death, but because these health conditions cause your stamina to regenerate at a slower rate. That means you get tired much quicker when stabbing zombos. This is plain annoying. Most of my deaths could have been avoided if I’d been fully watered when a crowd of rotfolk decided to descend upon me. Nothing hurts more than your pride when you’re too knackered and thirsty to even swing a baseball bat.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / The Fun Pimps
Don’t bust it down to easy too quickly
Do play around with the difficulty options
7 Days is surprisingly generous when it comes to building out your own custom difficulty. You can double the rate at which you earn XP, for example, but crank up the speed of zombies. You can demand an airdrop of supplies every day and triple the amount of damage you do to building blocks, but then increase the damage zombies do to your fort’s walls as well. In some ways this many options can be overwhelming. You can always just go with a preset difficulty. But I found playing around has let me make a world that jabs at me in juuust the right ways. Everyone has a microscopically different expectation of what “difficulty” means in a survival game, with all its contracting meters and bodily hazards. (The human metabolism isn’t consistent from person to person in real life, why would an abstraction of our endless burger desire be universally accepted?) So go crazy. Fiddle with the options until you find some balance between harm and helpfulness that works for you.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / The Fun Pimps
Don’t hang out with traders
Traders were added to the game a few years after it initially appeared, and they’ve grown from simple salespeople into ravenous quest givers with large settlements all their own. Unfortunately, these freakishly resourceful folks completely eradicate the sensation of being alone against the odds in the wasteland. I shot the first trader I met in the head with a hastily crafted pistol, only to learn they are also invulnerable. They are holed up in their fortresses, overstocked with every good imaginable, yet eminently unrobbable. In a post-apocalyptic zombie game, it not only feels weird that such people exist, but equally bizarre that you cannot simply commit acts of grand banditry against them. My advice? After the tutorial, ignore them as much as possible. Snub these invincible jerks. Or, even better,mod them out of the game completely!
Do shop around for a good location
There’s a saying in chess: “look for a good move, then find a better one”. This too applies to moving home in 7 Days. It is like any good property development TV show. Find a battered fixer-upper with tons of potential, and make it your own. Ah, a farmhouse with an adjacent barn. Wouldn’t this look lovely with a moat, darling? Oh look, a cosy camp of caravans in the hills. Wouldn’t this be wonderful if we surrounded it with artisanal spikes and land mines? The only caveat, of course, is that your beautiful new home will then attract plenty of, ahem, “prospective buyers” who will destroy everything in sight. At which point, you move onto the next place. It’s a strange property ladder, yes. But one that is bursting with newly added building types since the game’s earliest days. Movie theatres, hotels, military outposts, high schools… Explore early and often to find the best place to settle down (easily defensible, close to a water source, unobstructed views of the surrounding landscape). Take your time. Here, home ownership is eminently achievable, with enough violence.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / The Fun Pimps
Don’t forget the blood moon
Do follow the tutorial challenges
I know nobody wants to go to school during the apocalypse. But eleven years of early access have left a mark on the game’s tutorialising, which is a hodgepodge of UI text splashed in menus, alongside (genuinely useful) tooltips to read as your world loads. It’s not overly cohesive. But! The challenges tab gives you bite-sized crafting quests that will give you an idea of the web of items on offer. It’s a crafting game, after all, and that means even seemingly simple things demand a spaghetti of prerequisites. If you don’t want to learn another survival game’s opaque logic (bones make glue and glue makes duct tape) then I don’t know what you’re doing here. But if you’re determined to adapt to your cozy, zombie-spearing life, the tutorial challenges provide a curriculum that will improve your odds.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / The Fun Pimps
Don’t be afraid of a little dysentery
Do watch out for traps
Despite being a game offering procedurally generated worlds, the developers have created many locations as pre-built “points of interest”. A nice surprise is that each farm, hardware store, apartment block, and hospital can have its jump scares and secrets, the designers revealing an enjoyment for undead pranks. There are monster closet moments, often literally, as zombies hide in wardrobes and toilet cubicles only to burst out while you’re rummaging through kitchen cabinets for canned food. There are floors that collapse from underneath you and snakes lurking in the garden grass. Not only that, but many places have hints of bespoke environmental storytelling. Half-dug graves, boarded up windows, a lonely noose hanging from the rafters. I didn’t expect touches like these in a rando-gen survival game, and they go a long way to building the atmosphere.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / The Fun Pimps
Don’t take mercy on a coyote thinking that, because it ran away after being clubbed once, it is only a sort of “misunderstood puppy” and not, in fact, an obnoxious little terrorist who will chew on your ankles in the middle of a tense fight with some zombies, getting you killed in the process, the wee bastard
These dogs do not deserve to go to heaven. There, I said it.
Do go looking for antibiotics if you’re infected
Not because you necessarily need them (at least, I didn’t - the quickest way for me to lose this status was to simply die and respawn). But because it all adds to the fantasy. 7 Days is at its best when you fully step into the role of a put-upon wasteland loser. This means making your own goals on the hoof, and what better way to start a classic zombie story than “I got infected and went looking for pills”. This applies to all the needs and wants of the game. The challenges will teach you how to play and give you a checklist of stuff to try. But in the end you will get more out of the survivalist rambler once you start carving your own path. Build a fort on a lake and panic when you discover zombies can swim. Spot a desert and decide to cross it in search of a new biome. Pump all your resources into a machine gun and save it for the ceaseless horde of the blood moon (then gulp with embarassment when you run out of ammo in the first 60 seconds of shooting). Past all the early access stretchmarks, 7 Days remains a game about finding freedom in a pressure cooker. Turn the heat up, and enjoy it.
