Dead City

I went looking for something to surprise me in the quieter corners of Steam, and Dead City by Novalink gave me the particular kind of melancholy that only an abandoned Early Access project can. The game launched in May 2023 as a top-down action-adventure shooter set in a post-apocalyptic city overrun by zombies, raiders, and unique boss encounters. The core structure is mission-based: a schematic city map with a main quest line and optional side missions that feed you resources for leveling up whichever character you pick. There are multiple playable characters, each carrying distinct stats and abilities, and the weapon roster is genuinely wide on paper, ranging from melee standbys like bats, machetes, and a katana to AK-47s, shotguns, submachine guns, and throwables including Molotov cocktails and C-4. A crafting and item-repair layer sits on top, letting you upgrade gear in a forge using recipes and blueprints you collect in the field. The premise has real shape to it, the kind of small-studio ambition that earns a look. The friction becomes apparent once you look past the feature list. Steam's own store page carries a warning note that the last developer update was over two years ago. The community review pool sits at a mixed split across a very small sample, which tells you the audience never grew large enough to generate momentum in either direction. For a game that entered Early Access with explicit promises of map editors, modding tools, additional characters, multiplayer modes, and a deeper story campaign, the silence since launch is the loudest signal available. No update, no changelog, no community post. That kind of quiet on a young Early Access project usually means one thing. The atmospheric promise is genuinely there, which makes the neglect sting a little. A stylized, top-down 3D aesthetic and a post-apocalyptic city setting carry enough mood to make the early missions feel tense in a hushed, low-resource way. Hunger and thirst systems add a survival layer beyond pure combat, and the variety of armor types with differing stats gives loot-sifting at least some texture. If the full roadmap had landed, the craft loop and character variety could have made this a respectable small-scale looter-shooter. What you actually get today is an early skeleton of that vision, presentable but incomplete, with no visible path to the finish. I hold space for the underdogs. Sometimes a two-person studio ships something rough and then quietly iterates it into something worth the time. Dead City has not done that, and right now there is nothing here to suggest it will. If you have a high tolerance for unfinished things and the price reflects that reality, the bones are worth a curious hour. Everyone else should wait for a sign of life before spending anything.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Dead City.