Undead Inc.

My first few hours with Undead Inc. had me leaning forward in my chair, frantically color-coding a mental flowchart of which staff members had seen too much and needed to quietly disappear. That tension, right there, is the game at its absolute best. You play as a director of a local Endswell Medical franchise, building out a side-scrolling facility that runs legitimate doctor offices and pharmacies above ground while quietly excavating underground labs to manufacture bioweapons, illegally export serums, and, yes, engineer cybernetically-enhanced gorillas for the black market. The dual-economy loop, balancing franchise fees against mounting police heat and staff suspicion, is a genuinely sharp concept that sits somewhere between Two Point Hospital and a particularly unhinged episode of Breaking Bad. The mechanics that support that concept have real depth when they work. Staff are not interchangeable tokens: they level up, have individual moral thresholds, and some will snitch on your operation to the cops or the press if they witness too much. The game actually tracks what each employee has seen, and smart players learn to audit that list before sending anyone into a sensitive area. There are multiple research tracks, distinct director characters with their own perks and abilities, and two major modes, Scenario Mode on preset biomes and a Career Mode with randomized maps, that give the roguelite loop some structural variety. The extraction mechanic, grabbing your best staff and whatever cash you can carry before the inevitable collapse, is thematically satisfying even if it does not always feel mechanically rewarding. Here is where I have to be honest with the spreadsheet, though. The Metacritic sits at 65 and Steam user reviews land at a rough 28% positive, and neither number is entirely unfair. The core loop is narrower than it first appears: the black market is not really optional, the franchise fee escalates on a fixed timer regardless of how cleanly you run things, and the build order variety is shallower than the premise suggests. Scenario Mode is essentially a long tutorial dressed up as content, and once you have cracked the optimal flow of Doctors Office to Research Lab to Manufacturing to Underground Export, repeat runs start feeling like you are redoing your homework rather than finding new solutions. Worker AI compounds everything: staff will stand idle in sleep quarters, loop staircases without purpose, and refuse commands in ways that require full restarts to fix. The camera zoom is binary and annoying when warnings start flashing across multiple floors simultaneously. These are not minor rough edges; for a management sim audience that expects tight controls and readable information at a glance, they are genuine barriers. Who should still look at this? Players who found Theme Hospital or Two Point Hospital a touch too cozy and want consequence baked into every room placement. If the idea of tracking individual employee loyalty scores while quietly poisoning your own product line to juice black market numbers sounds like your idea of a great Tuesday night, the concept delivers enough of that fantasy to be worth the friction. The tutorial is optional and readable enough for newcomers to the genre, and the roguelite loop means a bad run is never the end of the world. Just go in knowing the content ceiling is lower than the premise promises, and that the AI misbehavior will test your patience before the cops ever do.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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