I've been playing a fair bit of Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead lately. I somehow managed to be totally ignorant that this post-apocalyptic rogue-like existed for years until a couple weeks ago. The quickest way to describe it would be Minecraft in a post apocalyptic setting with simpler graphics and richly detailed approximations of reality. It hits a lot of computer gaming itches for me: it's turn based so I can play at my pace, it's customizable, it's got cyborgs, it's got hunting and gathering, it's got annoying cars, and it allows for planning and tracking a whole bunch of fiddly moving parts. The player character is generally a lone survivor facing off against foes such as cyborgs, giant spiders, giant ants, mi-go, triffids, other survivors (but all the other survivors are not foes), wild dogs, a whole bunch of different Zombies and more.
There are so many options and after spendign a day or so poking at wikis and forums I decided to fire up a random character in a random starting position. I suppose I got immensely lucky becasue while my character Sally isn't particularly impressive she's a quick learner and had a few survival skills to start out with which couple with the remote LMOE shelter she started in has made it possible for her to survive over 45 days days on winter in post-apocalyptic zombie and mutant infested New England.
The scramble at first to not freeze to death while gathering supplies was the biggest threat of all and she almost lost her life and her hands due to frostbite but I managed to keep that from killing her and was able to scrape up enough supplies from a nearby farm house to then chase a horse down in a barn and kill it with a hammer so it could be butchered and keep Sally alive.
Further explorations have revealed a gas station, a motel, a school or library with an automated defense system, other farm, and a whole town not too terribly far away by the name of Goffstown (about 30-40 minutes away from me by car in real life).
I like this game becasue the only path to success isn't being a killing machine. Focusing on combat over anything else will kill your character. A problem I have with some online multi-player post-apocalyptic games are how they devolve into bully wish fulfillment for many players who have no real reason to act moderately decent to other players, this being a solo-play experience there's none of that to deal with but there are NPCs who do more than attack you out there somewhere in Cataclysm DDA.
Currently Sally has upgraded her pathetic staring gear to a shocking excess of clothing and some armor even thanks to a crashed military vehicle recently discovered. She's gone from a paleolithic stone hand axe, to a more proper stone axe, and now thanks to wider scavenging a proper honest to goodness steel wood axe and that makes not freezing to death and cooking a whole lot easier. She's become competent with her bow and has scavenged a couple of guns with a handful of bullets and has managed to hunt a few critters. I'd recommend not eating the giant mutant spiders but giant ant seems to be safe enough to eat despite being dangerous prey sadly the nearest ant colony is being attacked by some sort of armed group with some high-tech and high capacity weapons that have shot at poor Sally but not pursued her, they can't be doing too well because just a couple days ago she spotted one of them zombified while she was butchering a rabbit on a bridge. So far she's only tangled with 4 or 5 zombies total having avoided to roaming hordes and notgotten pinned down by zombies in the edge of Goffstown just yet.
I've probably jinxed her by typing about the game here but its good fun and I wanted to clue anyone in who may have similar interests to me but managed to not know about the game yet.
Here's the wikipedia page about the game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysm:_Dark_Days_Ahead
and the actual page for the game: https://cataclysmdda.org/
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