As we’ve discussed here in the past, one of the reasons zombies are so effective is because they’re so familiar – they are literally us, at least on the inside. The closer something is to home, theseries work so well because we’ve spent time in these places – if not the American ones, then all of the others around the world built in their image. There is power in familiarity, then, but giving players something they’ve seen before has its own issues. Old Man Murray was lampooning crates in videogames more than 20 years ago, and yet such containers are still staples today, alongside red-coloured barrels that will detonate from the impact of a single shot, taking out at least a couple of the enemies that spend so much time just hanging around these literal bombs waiting to go off. If you’ve been playing games for a long time, you have a good idea of what to broadly expect from them by now. And that’s partly what makes a game such as so notable.
