A zombie outbreak has occurred, turning most of the population into the living dead. A hungry man armed with an ax finds a map in an abandoned campsite. When looking at the map, he discovers North City marked as a sanctuary. Eager to leave the infected area, he makes it his destination to seek refuge. Not long after starting his journey, he meets a doctor and becomes her traveling companion. Along the way, they come across a father with a child, a boxer, and a dog, forming a bigger group. As the story progresses, all remaining survivors will join in for a chance of survival. Will they all successfully escape, or will they meet their demise in a horde of zombies?
Wanna Survive provides examples of the following tropes:
- Action Bomb: Zombies covered with purple blobs have red Cartoon Bomb icons on their upper right indicate they are filled with gas, making them just as explosive as gas barrels.
- Dead Weight: The large zombies. They deal high damage and have the most health out of all the zombies with a total of 6 hit points, but only move one tile each turn. When they grab a survivor, their victim is unable to escape without help from others, because the large zombies themselves can't be pushed. However, the Boxer can knock them away with his fists.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder:
- The Doctor and Girl. Giving them canned food won't grant them additional health, because their hit points are capped to one.
- As for the zombie's side, decomposed zombies play the role of fragile speedsters. They can cross more distance than a regular zombie, because of their light frame, but it makes them brittle enough to be killed by everything.
- Heavily Armored Mook: Zombies wearing bullet-proof armour are resistant to guns.
- The Load: In terms of performance, the Kid pales in comparison in all aspects to the rest of the cast. Aside from being a One-Hit-Point Wonder, her stick only does Scratch Damage to any zombie that is not a decomposed zombie and low mobility, which you'll often find her dragging behind the survivors quite often. Even her ability to attack in any direction becomes less unique when the Girl joins the team, who can do the same thing and outclasses her in terms of mobility, range, and damage.
- Long-Range Fighter: All of the ranged units are equipped with guns that allow them to attack afar, but they can’t fight back once a zombie has caught them unless their allies kill the zombie or push them to safety.
- Permadeath: Once a character dies, they stay dead for the rest of the game, unless you reset a turn with coins or restart the level.
- Post-Apocalyptic Dog: The Dog is one of the playable characters among the survivors. Different from human units who push objects away, the dog has a unique mechanic of dragging people or objects with it.
- Wizard Needs Food Badly: As a survivor spends a night without food, they will lose 1 HP by the next morning. When a survivor has one health remaining, they will enter a starved state. If they aren't fed anymore food, they won't live to see the next day. Management of canned food is important for keeping the survivors alive, especially when food resources become harder to find in late game.
