The story of a group of ordinary people struggling to survive a zombie apocalypse is a classic trope of movies and shooting games, but has never shown up in an RPG. Dead State, the first project from new studio Doublebear Productions, will change that. A zombie plague has overrun Texas, and the player must organize the people who have sought shelter at a small town school in order to survive the disaster.

Dead State will be filled with a lot of zombies, but defeating them is not going to be the focus of the game. The zombies in Dead State are going to be the sort that slowly shuffle along until they gets close to someone and try to bite. They are intended to only be threats if they gather in large numbers or if the player is careless. Instead, they serve as a constant background danger to other threats the survivors must face, such as the need to gather supplies or possible conflicts with other groups of survivors. Zombies will be attracted to noise, so controlling noise levels and taking advantage of this behavior will be an important part of the game. Of course, characters who are bitten by a zombie run the risk of becoming zombies themselves, which will lead to some tough choices for the player.

The game will be a turn-based RPG with an overhead perspective, in the vein of the original Fallout. The player will have full control over the main character, but only limited control over other survivors. All of the different survivors have their own personality quirks that will affect their willingness to follow your orders. The player will have to interact a lot with these characters through dialogue and other events in order to mold the group of survivors into a force capable of surviving the zombie threat.

For now, Doublebear only has plans to release the game via digital distribution for the PC. Unfortunately for fans of zombies and desperate survival, Dead State won't come out this year and doesn't have a set release date. For more information, check out the game's official website.