Zafehouse: Diaries

No matter what you do, your people will fight with each other. Really its more like dysfunctional relationship simulator.

A text-based adventure-style survival horror management game where you are the one running this monkey farm!

PROS
+ Cheap and compact
+ Generally fair but unforgiving difficulty
+ Minimalistic yet effective sound design
+ Clever, immersive TTRPG-inspired interface
+ Infinite replayability thanks randomly-generated playthroughs
+ Built-in editor to create your own custom survivours and adventures
+ Highly-engaging, if not downright addictive gameplay that perfectly encapsulates the tone and atmosphere of George A. Romero's "Day of the Dead"

CONS
- Only one save slot
- Five survivour limit
- Only three game modes
- Occasional Fallout 1-level interface jank
- "Zafehouse Diaries", not a particularly inspired title
- Half-baked relationship mechanic that feels very contrived at times
- Limited micromanagement options (e.g. no way to assign equipment to a specific character)

The game seems to have some potential and I can't say there's anything in particular I want to call out as what made this game bad. The juice just isn't worth the squeeze for me.

I got this game quite a long time ago, its definitely hard I tell you that. But once you know the strategy and all that, it is quite a good decision making game. One small mistake and it's game over. But nonetheless I still like it. 3/5

Played this game a lot when it first came out and in the early build it was just the hardest scenario. Not surprised it has a mixed reaction, as it's a difficult game. Right from the start I love the look with the hand drawn notepad map and Polaroid pictures. It's also cool that you can throw in pictures of people and locations you know and make it your own town. The sound is very good too and effective at putting you on edge. The game itself is overall pretty simple. You manage the different characters using pieces on the map. The goal is to move the pieces around to locations on the map to search and find things you will need to survive. Along the way you can choose a base and fortify it and upgrade any weapons/equipment you find. There is also a very rudimentary social aspect. Each character will have inherent biases (along with varying skill levels) and usually they will collide with other group members. If you are smart you can mostly ignore this by only grouping up people for tasks who are likely to get along and making your most volatile (or useless) member the base babysitter or solo lookout. You also get a few options to basically lie to the group about one person to boost their standing. I tend to save these in case I need them later, as you will also get frequent but random flavor scenarios that can really damper things depending on how you handle them. These are the best part and I wish there were more of them. I don't want to spoil any but they will pop up as a text giving you a few options to chose from. The outcomes can be positive if the right choice is made but will usually require more risk. Some of them have no possible positive outcomes. String together a few of those in a row and the game can become seemingly unwinnable. That's why you are seeing all the negative reviews. I have played enough to survive hardest difficulty with just one person after some bad rolls like that. It's doable but understand the game is supposed to be challenging in that way.

Some Tips:
you really can't delay early on. split and search quickly. always keep a lookout. find a base quickly. fortify/trap it fast. clear zombies from around it frequently in the late game. scout houses first if you haven't been in a while and always in the late game. bigger buildings with a lot of zombies outside will need to be assaulted first. in the late game you might need to have someone set a fire distraction close by to take a big one successfully. Don't get too attached to anyone in the group but do try to prioritize more capable people. I've also had some success sending really 'bad roll' characters (hates everyone, is useless) out on a suicide mission early. Seems that the game is more likely to give you a flavor scenario where you can add another survivor if you are one less than you start with. This can be especially useful on the hardest scenario.

Reinstalled this game after a while and i see why i put less than 4 hours into it. Everything is random and the game is extremely slow and boring. You can play rebuild on the internet for free and it's 20x better

A few points:
- Many events did not make sense and weren't properly explained, for example the same person could fight zombies and be absolutely slaughtering them or get gravely injured by one lone foe.
- Barricade materials from furniture and barricade/entry points were a nice touch, especially with fast and noisy or slow and careful settings.
- Interesting relationships with characters, which allow easy viewing of who feels what to whom.
- The above relationship mechanic is ungainly because, as one reviewer put it, you could leave these people alone on a camping trip and they'd murder each other. Stress may make people crazy but this game pushes it into frown-worthy territory.
- Constant difficulty with stuff going wrong in so many ways, but frustratingly so. Call me a terrible player but after many balanced or easier games like Rebuild 3 or State Of Decay, it seemed like every single action constantly makes survivors fight each other, get eviscerated by zombies or otherwise cause things to go horribly wrong. High skills in the relevant areas for the assigned task be damned.

Overall I did not enjoy this game and dropped it as soon as I found an alternative.

Interesting concept, personally I think that this is a grand idea that should be elaborated.

Here are some issues I have with the game:

-The game is pretty difficult even on the easiest mode. So if you'd just like to explore the game a little bit on a very easy mode, you can't do that.
-Few choices that you can choose from, especially at start. Game also tells you if you find a flashlight or beacon you can signal for other survivors at game start, yet you can't once you find them.
-Odd character trait combinations, I don't really mind this but it's kind of weird.
-When your survivor gets attacked and injured you can't do anything or react, it just kills your survivor without warning.

Personally I didn't really enjoy this game all too much, it got pretty old and repetative after a little while. Interesting concept though like I said earlier.

In a world of zombie apocalypse games that involve running around bashing zombies in the head with pointy objects or shooting them, Zafehouse: Diaries is a breath of fresh air. Well, not too fresh. Slightly festering and putrid, if I'm being honest. But, what do you expect from a zombie infested town?

I look at Zafehouse: Diaries as a cross between an RTS, in that you have a town to explore, the top down view of the map, the careful exploration; and an RPG in the careful balance you need to accomplish between your team members, the collecting gear, finding food and medication, and praying you don't get too badly injured. Injuries are bad. They severely compromise that character's ability to do tasks, and require proper medical attention and supplies to treat.

There are three modes of gameplay - Survival, escape by road, and escape by air. Each presents a very different type of game. Survival is the easy option. You start off solo, and have to survive for as long as possible, building your team as you go. My longest time is in the weeks. My shortest, in the minutes.

Escape by road is the 'middle difficulty'. You have a team of 5 characters, each with their own priorities, prejudices, likes and dislikes, and have to balance their happiness and health long enough for you to explore the town, find the car, and collect all the parts you need to get it working again. This is the type of game I have completed the most, and I can tell you that there are multiple endings, depending on how you do.

The final game type is the hardest. You have one week to assemble all of the clues and find a radio, and that will allow you to contact a helicopter for rescue. Take too long though, and you miss your opportunity. Move too quickly, and you risk your people being picked off one by one as they split up to search houses, shops, warehouses, factories, churches, schools, and so on.

The last thing I would like to mention is the Mods menu. Built into the game itself is the ability to create new characters to use, and new buildings for the town. Doing so, however, will disable achievements as this can be used to severely unbalance the game.

On the whole, if you are enjoy a good zombie apocalypse, but are looking for something a little different, then this could be the game for you.

This review is part of the Steamified Community Review program. For similar reviews and fantastic giveaways please visit http://www.steamified.com/.

It's like a mix of turn-based strategy and text adventure to create a diary-like experience of the zombie apocalypse. Each playthrough feels unique, and with certain implementations such as character relationships and permadeath, it can be quite a stressful experience. The developer is pretty cool too, even if the updates had taken a while to come along in the past.

For all the zombie games out there, I haven't found one that works so well for a hectic schedule and part-time play as this one. It's got a great atmosphere, awesome sound effects, and is incredible for saving at a moment's notice without losing anything of your game.

Well written and fun. Enjoy it.

This is an interesting game that had potential. Many different scenarios and choices to make. You can fortify your stronghold and improve weapons and character relationships. Move from house to house gathering supplies and killing zombies, or search and patrol your safehouse. Purpose and difficulty need to be addressed however, as there seems to be a lack of a main goal or objectives; and you can have a strong group with many weapons and protective gear, and yet be slaughtered with 1 wrong choice. Your characters are all at each others throats from the second you click "Start Game", and it is a very slow and arduous task of improving relations, that never gets finished as they will die off before you make everyone happy. Combat is very dissapointing also, as you can have armour and strong weapons, yet when zombies attack, or you go out on the offensive, be prepared to see that your characters suffered injuries or died because they only used a butter knife and a jacket, when they had in their possession: Guns, machetes, helmets and bats. Leaves you feeling bitter and frustrated.
Just read the other negative comments, every single one seems to sum up the game exactly how it is.
Not the worst game for the cheap price, a time killer, if you think a few pounds/dollars is worth 1-2 hours of playing.

At first, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by this game. Agressor dilemmas are perhaps a little more regular than you'd like, and its easy for your group to fall apart as a result of arguments and disputes. However, when you actually get into this game and develop a strategy, the majority of these things are either avoidable or fixable with a little effort.

Whilst there are plenty of FPS zombie games around (dear lord, someone make it stop), survival and reclaiming games such as this or Rebuild 3 are rarer. This game is very clever in forcing you to depend on not just your supplies but also the status of the members in your group to stay alive, providing a much more realistic post-apocalypse survival experience.

Of course, your group is varied every time in terms of background, age, gender, sexual preference, fitness and abailities, and with a randomly genereated map each game, no playing experience is like the one before. This variability gives the game an epic amount of replayability and - should you complete the three main campaigns - the game has an easy to use in-game custom content creator. Want to survive the apocalypse with your friends or the characters from your favourite TV show? Go ahead! Add pictures, careers, skills and personal abilities to your custom characters, playable in an endless sandbox game or on the campaigns.

Many reviews on here will complain that the group argues too much which causes everything to fall apart - cook a large meal and everyone will get along. Don't have enough food for a large meal? Break into a store. Dont have the weaponry to break into a store? Modify your weapons to create spiked bats and double barreled hand guns so that you CAN breach the store. Create a stronghold at the police station, steal medical supplies from the hospital. THIS. IS. A . STRATEGY. GAME. You can't just expect everything to go dandy,

This game is a challenge, and I love that. It has a stand out format with a fresh new style and thoughtful gameplay. I couldn't recommend it more.

My main reason for not recommending this game is that when the development had officially stopped i felt like i was scammed out of my money by the devs abusing the EA system.

I ended up being frustrated, because I got dragged into an addictive game, that in its finished state looks like an alpha test.

Character management

The most important thing you have to keep your eyes out for in tis game are character relations.If your group members hate each other there will be no way you can succeed because they will fight among themselves like they are on angel dust.
To stop that from happening you create rumors about certain group members (???) and the entire group reacts to it in certain ways.For example :

One in your group is homosexual and that other black dude really hates him because of it.To make their relations better you need to spread a rumor about the former that he was acused of crime against a homosexual. Does that sound logical to you?

Inventory system

Management of the inventory is implemented so horibly here, when I belive it should have been the center of devs attention.You cant chose which survivor should equip a specific item. Get used to seeing a janitor with a broken arm charge in with a butter knife while an armored full health bartender unloads all his ammo on two zombies and barely wounding them.

Difficulty

This game is unbeatable,or at least you wont care enough to give it that much tries to prove me wrong.Trust me,with all the RNG in this game it'll take you around 20 attempts to even start making progress. Zombie numbers increase constantly,you cant abandon breaching buildings (and end up storming infested ones without any reliable option to scout it or reduce zombie numbers).

Its a TEXT-BASED GAME.How hard can it be to just finish it? Instead you get a bunch of fanboys telling you garbage like "In before times there were no patches for games after they were out!!!!" or "You can mod using mods from THIS or THAT dead website!"
Overall a very punishing expirience. 3/10

This game could be so good but suffers from the "Luck" factor. It's understandable to have chance in a game but when you're striving your hardest to play intelligently and skillfully when the majority of what happens is blind luck. Sure you can play in a fashion that would give you the best survivability BUT it's just a roulete whether one survivor with a golf club may kill multiple zombies and come back without a scratch or whether a complete group of well armed and geared up survivors gets killed in one turn by a group of 10 or even 5 zombies!! Really? There are so many random happenings even when your fortify a shelter and gear up and the stats don't even seem to help much. There's more but not much that other reviewers haven't already said. Could be such a great (not good but great) but just falls flat on it's face with frustration.

I really want to like the game, but two (in-game) hours and people are already fighting. There is an end game apparently, but sh*t goes downhill at the start and just keeps gaining momentum. Even if you do things right and pick the right people for certain missions, the game just rolls the dice that says "you're dead" on every side of the dice. I spent money on a dying simulator that I don't even get to see. It's very easy to just say, "this person died." when you order them to go out. Spent a lot of time trying to beat this game, trying the best I can to keep the people alive as we get closer and closer to getting out alive, then all of a sudden. "This dude died, this chick gets pissed about it and hates everyone. So she's unresponsive and won't work well with anyone, then she dies as well. Now it's harder to do anything with only three people. Now everyone is dead. Good luck next time, sucker."

Also, "They did the best they could. Given they only had a jacket to defend themselves." B*TCH I BROUGHT WEAPONS, WHAT ARE YOU DOING WEILDING A F*UCKIN JACKET!?"

It is a decent game compared to the horde of other zombie games.

I have not won a game yet but eventually I'm sure I will.

Tips I can give.
1. Save frequently. One thing I've also done is moved the Zafehouse Diaries folder in My Documents to Dropbox. Making a NTFS junction from the original location to the dropbox location means I can technically restore back to any point as long as I have been saving frequently.
2. Events can be cruel, hence tip #1. I've found that sometimes an event is unwinnable but if I reload it enough, sometimes the event doesn't happen or can be mitigated.
3. Your survivors will eat way too fast. Searching for more supplies quickly and efficently is a must.
4. Assault a location before trying to breach it. Assaulting lets you kill more zombies than patrolling does.
5. Having more than two safehouses is useless in my opinion. The time required to secure a location is long enough when done quickly and noisily. Going slowly and quietly can take forever. Hence, I tend to secure two locations on opposite sides of the town right away. If I find the zombies getting too thick nearby, I can move.
6. Guns are useless. They just make alot of noise and draw the zombies.
7. Move your survivors as a group. More people during the assault makes it safer, during the breach too. After a successful breach, you'll want one person patrolling (to thin the herd outside attracted by noise), one person watching (to ensure that the zombies breaking in don't surprise the group), and one person searching (for food, medicine and vehicle parts) at a minimum. If you're in a factory, have one person improving gear (defense, breach/assault, searching). There is always jobs that can be done.

If five racists die after spending 3 hours fighting with each other, does anyone give a shit? This is the question posed by ZafeHouse Diaries as you are placed in charge of guiding a group of assholes to safety in the midst of a zombie apocalypse.

Zafehouse: Diaries certainly had potential and is enjoyable at times but the game is bogged down by questionable design choices and clunky in-game mechanics. Add onto this the fact is that there are now better games available that offer a much more fun experience like Rebuild.

The game IS a lot more enjoyable if you import your own characters into the game, since this is the only way you'll be able to inject any sort of likeability into your survivors. I mean, who wouldn't want to see if Hulk Hogan, Pope Francis and Wolverine can survive the apocalypse? However, doing this disables acheivements, so you'll be s.o.l. if you want to form an emotional attachment to the default group. The default group and their biases are randomized, and you'll be stuck with a random racists, homophobes, bigots and sexists. As you can probably imagine, this doesn't exactly endear them to the player right off the bat. Add in the virtually non-existant character development that occurs throughout the game, injury debuffs that never seem to go away and a penchant for NEVER coming through in the clutch and you will still not care about them when your survivors all die after playing for an hour.

At the start, you have to try and effectively manage everyone by both playing to their strengths and avoiding conflict with each other. However, one well planned rumour can make your life a lot easier and it's entirely possible to get everyone to like each other by the end of the second day. However, conflicts will still happen on rare occasions and your survivors will get pissed off about inane shit like having to wait to take a shower or not having anyone play chess with them.

Dora from JayIsgames put it best when she said, "You have nothing to go on other than the simple formula of incompatible traits, and it feels less like tempers reaching a boiling point and more like a bunch of variables behind a computer screen flipping you the bird." Sadly, this "bunch of variables flipping you the bird" is not limited to the relationships aspect of the game.

It's a nice little zombie game. What makes it special is that it's almost completely textbased. This won't stop you from spending a great amount of time with it. The "special effects" bring some colour and action into the gameplay and you often find yourself bitting your nails, waiting for the results of your last turn.
An additional Perk is that you can customize a great deal of things. Adding your own pictures or making your own weapons and tools for your survivors to find adds a personal note to your struggle for survival.
If you play it on endless mode this struggle can become pretty boring though. You might end up wondering if you should just send your survivors into a zombie horde and be done with it.
But for this little money it's a nice game for every now and then if you're bored with fancy animations and 3D Gameplay ;)

A diary style game where you fight zombies, bar up houses, and try to survive while accomplishing missions?
Sounds great!
Being able to bring my own friends into it? Even better!

So what's the problem? It's random, and some of it just doesn't make any sense at all. You can take a group of people out into a horde of zombies fight twenty times in a row and never get scratched. And on the tewnty first time your entire team can die.

You can clear out a building, barracade it completly, fill it with traps and then move to another building to go exploring. Your boobytrapped fortress will be full of zombies.

I liked the diary aspect, I liked a lot of the concepts, but the game isn't very clear on what items do, or what anything means. I could never tell if I had a good chance or no chance at all of accomplishing a goal. I don't know what items were better to bring along or leave behind.

Even cheating I got my butt handed to me even though my entire team had been at full life up until that point.
The game has potential, and I know some people like it, but it's too random for my tastes.

No, this is not that kind of zombie games, where you push W and smash left mouse button to kick the sh..t out of zombies. This is something better. Thriller with great T as it should, you can´t expect what´s gonna happen and this keep level of tension very high. You manage group of people, giving them orders and goal of this game is simple: survive as long as you can, everytime you start the game, you get different people with different experiences in different places. Manage them to survive and watch out for their relations. Everything they do is written in diary, so you can think, what to do in next turn 9/10

This game provides an interesting "choose your own adventure" setting to the zombie world. The game plays out in three different modes ("Sandbox", Goal with no time limit, strict time limit) and puts you in charge of a group of survivors. You'll need to give these survivors orders and plan carefully to win. All the action is communicated through diary entries which makes the game most of a create your own story.

I especially like how the game pushes the relationships as a key element as most zombie games miss this. However, sometimes they seem to hate eachother just because but it's an interesting element.

This game isn't going to appeal to everyone but anyone that doesn't mind using their imagination and loves the Zombie genre will definitely like this game. It's very challenging but be warned there's a lot of randomness to it and you may lose just because the game decides it.

Genre Lovers: Must Buy
Non-Genre Lovers: Skip it
Time to Beat: Each game takes about 1-2 hours but there's tons of replay value as every game plays out differently.

Oh and you can import your own survivors which makes it more fun.