Ground Zero

My first reaction to Ground Zero was something close to suspicion. A debut title from a remote-first indie studio in Sweden, published by Kwalee, promising to recapture the exact feeling of late-1990s fixed-camera survival horror - that is a pitch that invites cynicism. Too many games have worn that costume without understanding the soul underneath it. Ground Zero, to its considerable credit, is not one of those games. Malformation Games built this from genuine comprehension of why limited resources, obscured sightlines, and deliberate pacing create dread rather than frustration, and the result is one of the more confident indie debuts in the genre's recent revival. You play primarily as Seo-Yeon, a Korean operative sent into the ruins of Busan two months after a meteor strike mutated every living thing in the city. Her Canadian partner Evan feeds you radio contact and occasional relief from the tension, and the two characters have a dynamic that suits the campy, earnest tone the game is going for. The setting is genuinely fresh for the genre - the streets of a recognisable modern city abandoned mid-collapse, interiors frozen in panic, environmental details doing quiet narrative work in every room. The fixed camera system uses that geography well: angles are chosen to shape unease rather than simply frame space, and the twitchy position swaps as you move through larger areas carry real menace. You can choose modern controls or optional tank controls, which is the right call for a game that wants to welcome newcomers without apologising to purists. The structure gives you branching path choices - a funfair or a fishing village at the opening, a hospital or a police station around the midpoint - and each branch is substantial enough that a second playthrough holds genuine discovery. The police station alone accounts to roughly three hours of content. The arsenal runs from handguns with laser sights to shotguns, machine guns, and eventually a harpoon weapon worth hunting down. Most share ammo types, which keeps inventory pressure real without becoming a clerical nightmare. A scanning system rewards precision kills - the better the corpse condition, the more credits earned for upgrades, which elegantly nudges you toward knife use and Genome Point investment rather than spraying bullets. Save rooms let you combine colour-coded health serums into a syringe injector for permanent stat upgrades, and safes add a light puzzle element to resource access. Replayability is baked in through S-rank scoring, death tallies, unlockable costumes, and hidden endings. Not everything lands cleanly. The inventory interface fights you at moments when you least want friction - swapping to the knife requires a menu detour, and the parry system asks for a separate follow-up input that feels one button too many for close-quarters chaos. The auto-aim is useful but slightly awkward in implementation, and a handful of reviewers noted the gunplay lacks physical weight when enemies absorb shots without much response variation. The story itself is functional rather than memorable - a meteor-origin virus is the chassis, not the destination, and the mystery stays somewhat conventional. A late-game pacing wobble, the kind that comes from playing two horror games back-to-back in a single sitting, is real for completionists pushing toward the 15-hour mark. These are friction points, not failures. What Malformation Games gets absolutely right is the soundscape and the silence. The ambient audio does patient, careful work - corridors breathe, distant shuffling carries implied threat, and the minimalist score pulls back at exactly the moments it should, letting emptiness do the heavy lifting. The pre-rendered environments are rich with shadow detail, Seo-Yeon's body-mounted torch casting moving shadows across wreckage and decay in a way that keeps even familiar room shapes feeling unpredictable. For a debut title from a small studio, the craft here is worth defending loudly. Steam reception has been very positive since launch, and the Metacritic score of 79 reflects a game that divides opinion mostly along the fault line of how much tolerance you bring for genre conventions rather than any fundamental design failure.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Ground Zero.