Zombie survival games usually put a weapon in your hands and ask you to survive as long as possible. Resilient takes a very different approach, putting an entire settlement under your control while zombies, political unrest and the decisions you make threaten to tear it apart.
Currently in development for PC, Resilient is an upcoming colony management and survival strategy game set during the 17th century. Players are responsible for rebuilding civilisation after a zombie outbreak has devastated the world, starting with a small group of survivors and gradually transforming their camp into a functioning settlement.
Much of the daytime is spent expanding the colony and preparing for whatever comes next.
Players can construct buildings, establish production chains, grow food and gather the materials needed to keep the population alive. As more survivors join the settlement, the demands placed on the colony will continue to increase.
Keeping everyone fed and sheltered is only part of the challenge.
When night falls, zombies can descend on the settlement in large numbers, forcing players to depend on the defences they built during the day.
Walls, defensive structures and careful settlement planning can all become essential when hordes begin attacking. The undead are also expected to evolve as the game progresses, introducing variants that can move faster, survive more damage or otherwise make later attacks increasingly difficult.
But the zombies outside the walls might not always be the biggest threat.
Resilient gives individual survivors their own characteristics, beliefs and relationships, meaning the population will react to the way players choose to run the colony.
Players can create laws and influence the ideology of their growing society, but those decisions will not necessarily be welcomed by everyone.
Introduce unpopular policies, allow living conditions to deteriorate or fail to provide enough food and morale can begin to collapse. If enough people become unhappy, dissatisfaction can eventually develop into unrest and even rebellion.
It means players are effectively dealing with two different survival challenges at the same time.
The settlement needs to be strong enough to withstand attacks from the undead, but it also needs to remain stable enough that the people living inside do not turn against those in charge.
Exploration will provide another major part of the experience.
Scouting parties can be sent beyond the safety of the settlement to investigate the surrounding world, search abandoned locations and recover valuable supplies.
Other surviving communities can also be discovered.
Depending on their beliefs and relationship with the player’s colony, those settlements could become useful trading partners, potential allies or another complication to deal with.
Different communities may follow their own ideologies, potentially affecting how willing they are to cooperate and creating another political layer beyond simply expanding the player’s own territory.
Resilient appears to be combining ideas from several different areas of the strategy genre.
Its detailed settlement construction and medieval inspired presentation bring games such as Manor Lords to mind, while the constant danger of enormous zombie attacks has similarities to survival strategy games such as They Are Billions.
The difference is the additional focus on politics, ideology and relationships between survivors.
Building the biggest settlement possible will not necessarily mean much if the population becomes unhappy enough to overthrow you.
The game is being developed in Unreal Engine and makes use of technology including Lumen and Nanite to create its environments, buildings and growing settlements.
Perhaps one of the more impressive details surrounding the project is that Resilient is being developed by a solo developer under the name CNRDEV.
Despite the scale of the concept, the project has already managed to attract significant interest from PC players, collecting tens of thousands of Steam wishlists while still being relatively early in development.
There is currently no confirmed release date for Resilient.
The game can already be wishlisted on Steam, with further development updates expected as work on the project continues.
For players who enjoy building settlements but want to deal with more than production chains and population numbers, Resilient could offer an interesting combination of colony management, zombie survival and political decision making where the people behind your walls can become almost as dangerous as the creatures outside them.