Undead Chronicles takes the HUD away and slows the zombies down

Istanbul, 1923. The occupation is crumbling and the streets are silent. A leprosy-like plague has turned the living into undead — slow, relentless and lethal. You are RJ Edwards, a British banking official sent to the Imperial Ottoman Bank on a promotion you never wanted.

You arrive, you find an abandoned office with crooked ledgers and a brass nameplate still carrying your predecessor’s name, and outside there is rain and gunfire while the radio advises calm. Three days later the gunfire stops, the radios fall silent, and when you step into the corridor the city has collapsed.

The mechanical claims are precise: crisp aim-down-sights gunplay with historical weapons that have real weight, one bite means permanent death, and there is no map, no HUD and no waypoints. Slow enemies plus permadeath plus no interface is a coherent set — each one is only survivable because of the others.

Slow zombies are not easy. They are a spatial puzzle: what they close off, how many are between you and the stairs, whether the room you are backing into has another exit.

The power of video game HUDs is the thing being tested. A HUD tells the player what they are allowed to know, and taking it away only works if the world says the same things louder. Ammo has to be countable by feel, health by sound, direction by architecture.

Redesigning death is the other half, and permadeath is the strongest version of the question. If one bite ends the run, every corridor is a decision with no take-backs, which is enormous tension and also the fastest way to make a player stop playing.

Sealed vaults, flooded cisterns and rain-slick streets are named in the store copy, and they are the right kind of spaces for it: enclosed, legible, with a limited number of ways in and out that you can learn.

Undead Chronicles is by Seyfhouse Games, self-published, listed as To be announced on Windows, under Action and Indie. A reliable pistol and a bolt-action rifle are called out specifically, which tells you the intended rate of fire and the intended panic level.

1923 Istanbul is an unusually good setting for this. A city between empires, with a real historical silence to it, gives the collapse somewhere specific to happen instead of the generic ruined town most zombie games settle for.

If the appeal is a shooter that refuses to hand you a power fantasy, War Fantasy is the other one on this list — a psychological horror FPS about war games and real warfare merging.