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The original was posted on /r/epicgamespc by /u/BackgroundStomach916 on 2025-02-05 13:44:23+00:00.

Review: Undying — 3/10 (very bad)

Undying feels like the early-access version of a game that could be good given at least another year of development. 

I actually really like Undying’s core gameplay mechanic on a conceptual level. It’s a zombie-survival game with two main characters. There’s Anling, a mother doomed after being bitten by a zombie, and her son Cody. The whole story is about Anling preparing Cody to live on his own after she’s gone.

This means Cody is useless at the start of the game. But every time Anling does something, Cody watches, and he learns how to take her place. 

It’s a cool idea with horrible implementation. As Cody slowly gets stronger, Anling rapidly gains severe debuffs that prevent her from engaging with core gameplay elements. And these stack on top of each other, so my Anling would be unable to fight, eat, scavenge or do basically anything. 

It got so severe that I was actually softlocked about 12 hours into my first playthrough, forcing me to start over from the beginning. 

Undying’s English translation is also very lacking. Conversations between characters are stiff, and the dialogue is plagued with typos, such as spelling “people” as “peolpe.” This doesn’t hurt the story that much, but it is a problem when game mechanics aren’t explained correctly due to mistranslations. 

Getting through Undying felt like playtesting a promising indie title in early beta. It’s a shame because the game has a solid premise. 

Want a better idea of my taste in games? Check out my Backloggd.

Journal Entry:

My New Year’s resolution was to beat all of Epic’s weekly, free games and document it on Reddit until May. This week was honestly a little rough. Not only was Undying the longest game so far, but I also developed severe flu symptoms on Friday night.

Having a longer game alongside the flu wasn’t the worst thing in the world, as it gave me something to do while trapped in my room. The problem was that I just didn’t really like Undying for the reasons stated above.

I actually had a good amount of fun at first. Undying has a pretty art style, and the core gameplay loop reminded me a lot of This War of Mine, another survival-scavenging game. I could even initially forgive Undying’s poor English translation. 

But it became increasingly clear that my save file was going to get soft locked after more than 10 hours. Even on the standard difficulty, Anling became useless exponentially slower than Cody grew in strength. 

So, I played the game again. For full transparency, I did it on the easiest difficulty. I didn’t want to get soft locked again and felt like having an active fever was a decent excuse. 

Undying was smoother that time around, but not enough to really change my opinion about anything. The balance still felt awkward and the dialogue was just as rough. 

Who knows though, maybe someone else will like Undying more. If you want to give it a shot, the game is free until Thursday morning.

Next week thankfully seems like a nice change of pace with Beyond Blue. Here’s hoping I’ll be over the flu by the time it comes out!