Be the zombie apocalypse.
Zombie Night Terror is a 2016 Lemmings-inspired strategy-puzzle game developed by NoClip and published by Gambitious Digital Entertainment. The game takes place, obviously, in the zombie apocalypse. Instead of being a survivor of the apocalypse as usual, you are the zombie apocalypse as you infect humans and complete challenges while chasing after the mad scientist who started this whole mess.
Zombie Night Terror contains examples of the following tropes:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The A.I. created by The Men in Black doesn't have any idea what a zombie is, and assumes that humans are becoming rapidly stupider. When the zombies are explained, the A.I. decides to eliminate all possible vectors of contamination, including uninfected humans.
- And I Must Scream: Although Overlord zombies can scream, and constantly do, they are literally rooted to the spot. All they can do themselves is wave their arms. And when you don't need them to move the horde anymore, there's nothing left for them except death. They cannot be transformed back.
- And Then John Was a Zombie: The fate of any human that dies because of a zombie. Before it was patched, this also happened to any human that happened to die for any reason, including falling from a great height, being shot or being ran over by a car.
- Asshole Victim: The Drug Lord, thugs keeping a couple hostage, a cannibal planning to eat his frightened girlfriend, neglectful doctors and a bunch of PC elitists bullying a Mac user, just to name a few.
- Corridor Cubbyhole Run: "Railway to Hell" has a train that passes down the subway killing any zombies it runs over. Make sure your zombies aren't in its path when it arrives.
- Death by Irony: The chemist is eventually killed by the very same zombies he had created through his drugs.
- Elite Zombie: There are three zombie mutations that allow you to transform a zombie into a stronger one:
- Overlords are stationary, but they can direct the otherwise dimwitted zombie horde. If given an ability, they'll be able to direct zombies into using it (Run, Jump) or repeatedly spam it (Spit, Scream).
- Crawlers are immune to Falling Damage, are capable of using Wall Crawl to climb walls and can crawl through narrow vents. They're also Stealth Experts which cannot be detected by humans if they approach from behind.
- Tanks are durable and huge, capable of defeating humans very quickly while soaking up bullets far better than regular zombies. Their abilities usually add extra force, such as Run becoming a charge that kills humans and breaks down walls, Scream knocking humans away, Jump causing a Shockwave Stomp, and Spit creating a big Damage Over Time area that infects or drives humans away.
- Enemy Mine: The Murderous Cortege level has the zombies and humans "working together" to stop the evil AI. That term should be only used in the loosest sense as you aren't making the zombies cooperate with the humans so much as keeping the two groups from killing one another by directing the zombies away from the humans and helping them reach the AI core by disabling its defenses.
- Feed It a Bomb: This is how you defeat the horribly mutated chemist. When he opens his Belly Mouth to suck in the zombies, making them use Explode will cause some huge damage after he sucks them in.
- Kill It with Fire: Not only can survivors lob Molotov cocktails at you, but the Latino drug lord decides to use Molotov cocktails on trapped zombies. It works, but the smoke from the fire has a distinctly green tinge.
- Little Red Fighting Hood: The Michelle enemy hacks zombies to pieces with a sword and wears a cloak soaked in red zombie blood. This makes her immune to physical attack by zombies, but spitting and explosions can hurt and kill her.
- The Magic Comes Back: The Mega Monolith gives its followers (possibly) magical powers such as levitation, barrier generation, and shooting streams of fire from their hands.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: What is the Mega Monolith? A Sufficiently Advanced Alien or something more? It seems to be scientifically minded and its followers are technologically advanced, but others seem to be able to cast magic.
- The Men in Black: Some sort of secret society is studying the Zombies, and while they have nothing to do with their creation they don't seem to have mankind's best interests at heart.
- Nested Story Reveal: After the horribly mutated Chemist is defeated, we cut back to the first level which has become decayed and abandoned... then a random woman crawls out of the dumpster and walks to the right. She appears startled at something off screen and attempts to run to the left only to be surrounded from both ways by zombies. As she screams in terror, it's revealed that the woman, Juliette, is an actor for the movie "The Last Woman on Earth"... but then one of the workers finds a syringe of Romero on the ground, the director puking up blood and violently shaking soon after before cutting to black.
- Organic Technology: the A.I. that runs the Elaborate Underground Base is literally a massive brain the size of a house.
- Professor Guinea Pig: You think you have defeated the already mutated Chemist in the final level... But then he stabs himself in the neck with a syringe and transforms into a hideous monstrosity.
- Rise from Your Grave: Zombies start to rise from the grave when the green smoke turns into green rain.
- Shout-Out: There's a lot of them...
- The name of the drug causing people to turn into zombies is "Romero". The drug is named after director George A. Romero, famous for Night of the Living Dead (1968).
- One of the challenges is to kill Gronald the Clown.
- Yet another challenge is to kill The Zombinator.
- At the beginning of the first level set on the graveyard, there's a group of people hanging out near a tomb, one of which is a naked woman dancing on top of it.
- Splash of Color: The game is Deliberately Monochrome except for the anything colored green or red.
- Suicide Attack: You unlock the ability to explode zombies later on in the game, which kills the zombie and any human nearby. If any cracked blocks are nearby, it will destroy those too.
- Top-Heavy Guy: Tank zombies and muscular humans have massive upper bodies in contrast to their ridiculously short and skinny legs.
- Villain Protagonist: You play as a zombie horde whose goal is to infect and kill humans.
- We Have Reserves: A mindset which you must embrace to win. Evaporate those zombies about to die or get stuck in useless positions to get more DNA points. Send disposable meat shields at a human gunner until one of them manages to take him down. Turn your minions into living bombs. It's all for the mob's benefit.
- Zombie Apocalypse: Naturally. A chemist's serum has started turning people into viral zombies that threaten to overrun the world. The twist is that you play as the zombie horde.
- Zombie Puke Attack: The Spit ability allows the zombies to spit infectious goo at long-range. Overlords can constantly use this like a turret of sorts but cannot aim it, Crawlers' spit can ricochet and bounce off surfaces, and Tanks' spit attacks explode into a lingering area of infectious gas that can infect or drive away humans.
