Ed-0: Zombie Uprising

I went into Ed-0: Zombie Uprising half-expecting a breezy curiosity, the sort of niche D3Publisher title that lives and dies on a single goofy premise. What I got instead was something considerably stranger and more demanding: a Soulsborne-paced action-roguelite set in 1854 Edo-period Japan, where Commodore Perry's Black Ships don't just open trade routes but unleash a zombie plague across a country already locked in isolation. The setup is genuinely inspired, and the deadpan historical irreverence underneath it, including a cameo from ukiyo-e master Hokusai and a final boss named after a real U.S. Navy admiral, carries a low-key wit that the game is too modest to spotlight. I loved that about it. The three playable classes, Samurai, Sumo Wrestler, and Ninja, feel meaningfully distinct. The Samurai is a well-balanced all-rounder, slicing off limbs to reduce zombie mobility. The Sumo leans on raw, body-slam brutality and skull-crushing grapples. The Ninja moves fast, throws kunai, and has access to Fire and Earth Jutsu. Each run has you dropping into procedurally generated dungeon floors and hunting Torii gates, color-coded to lead you toward food, items, charms, or the Secret Arts that form the spine of your build. Secret Arts are the four special attacks mapped to your face buttons, and when a run goes well, stringing them together with stacked charms and thrown weapons turns into a genuinely satisfying power trip. The moment a thrown jug of sake stumbles an entire mob into a ragdoll pile is the kind of emergent chaos that keeps you coming back. Here is where the honesty has to come in, though. The RNG variance is severe. A bad run without useful Secret Arts means chewing through zombie hordes who act as damage sponges, eating three or four combo strings before going down, and that grind feels punishing in a way that isn't always purposeful. The hunger mechanic adds further pressure, forcing you to hustle through floors rather than loot carefully. Some bosses are genuinely clever; others are simply broken, with hitboxes that do not behave as advertised and cameras that cannot keep pace with their movement patterns. Permanent progression via gold and virtue points helps sand down the early frustration, but the item pool shows its limits fast, and most of the loot is familiar within five hours. Glitches still surface: enemies spawning inside walls, attacks clipping through doorways, the occasional run-ending cheap shot from off-screen. What makes Ed-0 worth discussing despite all of that is its specific atmosphere. The art direction is low-budget but committed. The dungeon environments range from fog-drenched forests and lantern-lit mansions to windswept cliffs and pitch-black nighttime farmland. There is something genuinely eerie and a little funny about watching a sumo wrestler hurl a zombie into a torch-lit wall while mist rolls across the courtyard. The game knows its own absurdity and leans into it without ever becoming a pure joke. That tonal balance is rarer than people give it credit for. Fans of Earth Defense Force, OneeChanbara, and other mid-tier Japanese action games with more personality than polish will recognize the appeal immediately. Fans expecting Hades-level mechanical refinement will be frustrated before the second hour.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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