John, The Zombie

I put the kind of time into John, The Zombie that I usually reserve for broken Paradox betas, and the verdict is straightforward: the core concept is genuinely clever, the implementation is persistently rough, and the post-launch trajectory has made things worse, not better. You are John, a scientist who accidentally turns himself undead while trying to resurrect a cat. From that absurd premise, the game drops you into Johnwood, an open-world sandbox city, where your job is to eat the brains of residents to unlock basic human functions you have forgotten, things like sprinting, riding a vehicle, or even performing activities like horse racing. That skill-progression loop, where consuming brains restores abilities, is the most interesting design idea in the package. It gives eating a mechanical purpose beyond spectacle, and it creates a rhythm of targets, feeding, and unlocking that could have anchored a much tighter game. The open world itself is small and functional rather than interesting. Quests send you across the map for objectives that feel padded out, including a graveyard-digging mission that chains a timing-based mini-game to an unreasonable number of graves. Combat, if you can call it that, is a single button press (E) when standing near an NPC, which triggers a kill animation. There is no jumping, no real brawling, and NPCs have a baffling AI habit of running directly toward you after spotting you, removing what little tension a hunting loop might have created. For someone who cares about decision depth, this is extremely thin. The stamina bar runs down constantly, which means you are always hunting just to stay functional, but the repetition of kill-press-cutscene-repeat drains the novelty inside the first hour. The bigger problem is the game's current technical state. What launched in 2017 as a buggy but somewhat playable curio has accumulated issues with horse-race challenges that frequently crash or fall through geometry, vehicle spawn points that no longer behave correctly, and invisible wall problems in sections of the map that block campaign progress. Community guides exist specifically to work around these bugs for achievement hunters, which is a telling sign. The developer was active early on, but user reports suggest support has gone quiet, and the fixes that did ship introduced new instability elsewhere. Sitting at a mixed rating on Steam from roughly 180 reviews, the community is split pretty evenly between people who enjoy the absurd premise enough to forgive the roughness and people who hit a hard blocker and bounced immediately. Who is this actually for? Players who enjoyed the low-stakes chaos of Goat Simulator and are comfortable with a game that treats bug encounters as part of the experience will find something here for an hour or two. The villain-protagonist angle is underexplored in the genre, and the brain-eating skill tree is a foundation worth appreciating. But anyone expecting a complete, polished open-world action game with coherent systems will be frustrated fast. There is no mod ecosystem, no community tooling, and the options menu is sparse enough that even basic keybinding and volume control are absent. For strategy and sim players drawn here by the simulation tag, manage expectations sharply: this is a novelty sandbox, not a systems-rich sim.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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