Zombies have become a genre unto themselves in the realms of gaming, with most in this category requiring you to get through, survive, and usually massacre whole hordes of the nibbling humanoids. Yet, by the in-universe and proper definitions of zombies, a few of the best and most popular zombie games don’t even have zombies. This is a dive into the proper classifications of the perceived zombies in all-time great zombie games.
The Last of Us
The Last of Us has all of the makings of a great zombie game, featuring tense sneaking levels, growly biters trying to feed on your main characters, and a mostly empty post-apocalyptic world of a few survivors. However, it’s made very clear that the zombie types in the game aren’t zombies at all.
In The Last of Us, they’re termed “infected” and don’t tend to tick the key box for a zombie – which is to be a reanimated corpse. Instead, people contract a fungal spore which can take up to a day to take hold after suffering an infected wound or breathing in the spores. Then, the infected develop deeper into the fungal infection.
Over the span of decades, the infected human will transform as the fungal infection takes hold, growing grotesque abnormalities and developing new skills to survive and spread the fungus further. It’s a brilliant take that allows the setting to get more dangerous with time and offers a natural thread to explain tougher enemies.
Dying Light
Released in 2015 by Techland, Dying Light might just be the scariest zombie game made since the turn of the millennium. In the day, the zombies are fairly squishy and almost comedic to parkour over and club aside, but at night, everything changes. Here, it’s the Volatiles that literally make you end your adventures as dusk approaches.
It was this focus on these darkness-enabled zombies, the frantic runs into UV lights, and their sheer ferocity that made the first game so terrifying. The second game suffered from the same pitfalls as all zombie games, pivoting to a human drama as we’re worse than anything undead and biting outside of our walls.
Of course, in Dying Light, the Volatiles and even the distinctly zombie-like creatures roaming around in the day aren’t zombies. Like in The Last of Us, they’re all infected people, but this time through the Harran Virus. As the virus can mutate quickly between hosts, it leads to a few abnormal infected, including the hellish Sentient Volatile.
Resident Evil
Hailed as the game that really kicked the zombie gaming craze into high gear and for delivering some of the most claustrophobic, iconic zombie levels ever made, even Resident Evil doesn’t feature zombies. Instead, they are mutations usually said to be the result of errors in biological weapons or genetic mutation research.
They have a hunger for living humans, their skin suffers from necrosis, and some even mutate beyond the physicality of the host, but all are mutations rather than zombies. This hasn’t stopped the series from selling millions upon millions of copies. Only last year, it was reported that RE2, RE3, and Village continued to sell very well, hitting 11.2 million, 6.4 million, and 7.4 million, respectively, by September 2022.
They may be held up among the very best zombie games ever made, with each putting a distinct or iconic spin on the theme, but none of The Last of Us, Dying Light, or Resident Evil featured real zombies.