"*stretching and yawning*
"Aw, man; never thought I'd miss my alarm clock."
—opening lines
The Zombie Apocalypse is in full swing. Undead as far as the eye can see. And as par for the course in such settings, people are taken to drifting through the remains of the world just trying to survive and find friendly survivors.
Luckily, the voice of some survivors has been heard on your radio set. Hope surging in your heart, you now have a reason to live. Time to go find them, and with them, a reason to go on.
Arizona Sunshine is a VR-exclusive Horror Game by Vertigo Games and Jaywalker Interactive. It was released on December 6th, 2016 for PC through Steam, was ported to PS4 on July 5th, 2017, and then to the Oculus Quest on December 5th, 2019. The first two versions of the game had eventually received a "Dead Man" expansion on May 24th, 2018, and another one called "The Damned" on October 3rd, 2019. The Quest version received "Dead Man" on March 26th, 2020 (and was given out free to anyone who already owned the game) and "Damned" on April 29, 2020.
Arizona Sunshine contains examples of:
- Abandoned Mine: The Ol' Dutchman Mine. It likely hasn't been used since the nightmare began, and now it's currently swarming with zombies.
- Ambiguous Ending: The screen fades as the protagonist is rescued by a helicopter, but if you're wondering who he is, how he got there, and where he's going... you'll just have to keep wondering.
- An Arm and a Leg: Several zombies you see throughout the game are already missing an arm or a leg, but you can also blow off their limbs with well placed shots.
- Awesome, yet Impractical: Some of the guns fall under this category.
- Submachine guns can help thin out a horde pretty early, and are vital for holding the line at choke points. The problem is, early on, don't have a lot of pickups at ammo crates to make carrying more than one at a time practical.
- Shotguns — at least, the one in the base game — don't get more than three shots at a time, forcing the player to keep track of how many shells are left. On the other hand, one shot at close range will shred any zombie regardless of their armor, making it a good emergency weapon for when the zombies get too close.
- The grenade launcher pistol is the biggest example — it only gets one shot before you have to reload, its rounds (when you're even able to find any) are subject to gravity, and you'll blow yourself up if you're standing too close.
- Blackout Basement: Some areas of the game are so dark that you have to hold a flashlight with one hand in order to see anything.
- Body Horror: It's a Zombie Apocalypse. Zombies routinely have limbs missing, some have disgusting fungus-like growths covering part of them, all are discolored, and of course, you can inflict some serious wounds on them.
- Boom, Headshot!: A single headshot from any handgun will instantly kill a zombie, while around four shots will be required otherwise.
- Boring Yet Practical: Pistols. They're nothing special, but headshots can reliably put down a zombie, ammo is easy to find, and there's a few special models out there (a rapid-fire variant, one with a flashlight, and a couple of magnums) that can be much more practical in a shootout against Fred.
- Checkpoint: At certain points, the words "Checkpoint Reached" will show up on the bottom of the screen. You retain your arsenal if you die and respawn at this point.
- Continuity Nod: When you activate the generator in "Dead Man" a nearby radio activates advertising the soon-to-be zombie-overrun festival you see the results of the main campaign, even mentioning a dance in the barn - from which which you saw a horde of Freddies swarm out of.
- Cut and Paste Environments: Some reused environmental assets are the flip side of a game's grand scope in the VR world.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Reloading in most shooters is just a matter of pressing a button. In some VR games, it is instead done by moving a gun to the player's belt. In Arizona Sunshine, however, you need to first press a button to eject the empty clip, then move the emptied weapon to the player's belt to reload, with the unusual system acting to amplify the tension of each encounter.
- Despair Event Horizon: Twice. Each time, the survivor makes it to a supposed safe zone only to find that everyone's dead.
- Driven to Suicide: Quite a few of the corpses you discover in the world have clearly done this.
- Fan Disservice: One of the recurring enemy types is a female zombie in a bikini. Decay has not done the body any favors.
- Floating Limbs: Your character's hands are just floating in the air in front of you, holding whatever you have in your hands.
- Gatling Good: There is a setpiece where you get to dispatch a huge horde of zombies with a minigun.
- Guns Akimbo: You can wield a gun in each hand.
- Hold the Line:
- Every now and then, you'll have to hold a particular position as the zombies come pouring at you in droves. This lasts either until you kill all the zombies, or a door unlocks and you can make a run for it.
- Horde Mode is this by default.
- Hollywood Darkness: Averted like hell. Places are routinely pitch black with nothing but the muzzle flash of your guns and a flashlight if you're lucky. It's incredibly unnerving.
- Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: there are many places in the game there's no reason why you couldn't go aside from the fact that it's a game and it directs you a certain way. Right before the Old Dutchman Mine there are a bunch of concrete barriers with gaps in them you could easily scoot between and continue to follow the road... but you can't.
- This can be exploited in Horde Mode by physically walking. As long as your eyes aren't inside an object, you can walk a few feet to pass through any object with a window it. This allows players to camp outside the area that zombies can reach.
- Laser Sight: Some of the better weapons you find will have a laser sight attached.
- In easy mode all the guns have a laser sight. Not so in normal and hard.
- Lazy Artist: All the cars have the same license plate.
- No Name Given: The protagonist has no known name.
- Not Using the "Z" Word: The survivor that the player controls has taken to calling the zombies "Fred," for some reason.
- Post-Apocalyptic Traffic Jam: Pretty much every single place you explore that has a road will be full of abandoned cars. Fortunately, this also means you have access to whatever is inside of them.
- Revolvers Are Just Better: You can wield revolvers against the zombies. They are a step-up over your starting pistol, but you'll need to reload them more often as well, so good accuracy is paramount.
- Scavenger World: You'll need to grab whatever you can find to survive.
- Short-Range Shotgun: Any shotgun will mince the zombies up close, but rapidly loses its effectiveness at distance.
- Undeathly Pallor: Some of the zombies in the game have grey skin.
- Yank the Dog's Chain: See Your Princess Is in Another Castle!. Later, you finally get to Sunshine...only to discover everyone's dead there, too; the radio signal was an automated broadcast! Subverted, however, in that your despairing rant on the microphone gets the attention of some live help.
- In The Damned DLC, you've made it through the dam, gotten the generators up and running, and are about to get out of the dam via evac, only for your Ungrateful Bastard of a commander to leave you for dead, washed away by the dam's waters and drowned in the lake below.
- In Dead Man, you launch the ICBM only to become infected yourself, telling the guards to kill you before you turn.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: You made it to the source of the radio signal, an oil refinery fortified by the military...but the zombies have already overrun the place. One level later, you get another radio signal, this one pointing towards an evac point.
- Zombie Apocalypse: Well, naturally.
