It’s ten years since the infection started. Long-established settlements are collapsing, one by one, for unknown reasons. Survivors are running to the hills to escape, hoping for safety in remote places. As another refugee, you’re here to carve out a new life for yourself – by any means necessary.

Survivalist: Invisible Strain is an open-world colony-building sim set in the zombie apocalypse, often compared to State of Decay, Project Zomboid, Rimworld, Kenshi, or “The Sims but with zombies”. It focuses on characters and relationships as well as survival.

Game Features

• You can talk to anyone… All living characters in the world have names and personalities. They remember your actions, and their memories affect their mood and their opinion of you. They have their own lives: gossiping, eating, sleeping, keeping warm, working and fighting. Some will give you quests; it’s up to you how or whether to complete them. Use negotiation, friendship, violence, stealth or trickery to achieve your objectives!
• You can recruit anyone… You can recruit other survivors by making them like you, or respect you, or fear you. As you recruit followers they’ll need a place to sleep, a steady food source, a fire to keep warm, and walls to keep out enemies. You’ll need to manage their morale and relationships; sometimes they’ll get depressed, or start fighting each other. Sometimes they’ll kiss and make up. Sometimes they’ll want to hang out with you, or chat you up. You can chop down trees, mine rocks, and look for other resources in the abandoned towns dotted around the map. Set traps for enemies, or rabbits. Hunt deer, keep chickens, grow crops, or take more desperate measures if you’re really hungry! Assign your community members roles such as Farmer, Chef, Arrow Crafter, etc. Over time you can build a well-defended, self-sufficient settlement that even produces its own bullets.
• You can be anyone… When you start a new game you can set up your character’s appearance, clothing, equipment, skills, and personality. Different dialog options are available to people with different personality traits.
• You can fight anyone… The gameplay is a hybrid of Third Person Action and Real Time Strategy. Directly control each character in the third person action view, or go into the overhead view to assign orders. You can target your enemies’ legs to slow them down, or try to hit their heads for massive damage. You can dodge or block in melee combat – and so can your enemies. Different characters have different skill sets and can level up to improve their Archery, Firearms or Hand to Hand abilities. Eating better food improves your Constitution, which makes you more likely to survive when you lose a fight.
• You can kill anyone… You can sneak up on enemies and assassinate them, or just knock them out cold and steal their stuff. Throw bottles or chunks of meat to distract zombies. Wear camouflaged clothing to boost your Stealth skill. Animals and zombies have a keen sense of smell, so make sure you check the wind direction! You can order your community to attack enemies en masse, or get one person to act as a lone assassin. Fight using melee weapons, bows and arrows, guns, and explosives. Fight dirty with infected weapons. Repair vehicles and run your enemies over!
• But you can’t trust anyone! There is always the lurking danger of Invisible Strain, a mysterious new strain of the zombie virus. Those infected seem normal as they infiltrate your group and spread the virus, until one day they’ll turn on you!