We Love It's Guide to…
As a refugee in a zombie-ravaged wilderness, scavenge, fight and recruit survivors while building a community under threat.
Released 25 Apr 2025
Recruit Living Survivors
Manage Survivor Relationships
Unmask Hidden Infected
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.
Developed by Bob · Published by Ginormocorp Incorporated
Ten years after an infection began, established settlements are collapsing and refugees are fleeing to remote areas. You play another survivor trying to make a home in this dangerous world, where the mysterious Invisible Strain can infiltrate a group and spread unnoticed.
Explore abandoned towns and wilderness for supplies, chop wood, mine resources, hunt, farm and craft. Face zombies and hostile human groups through direct combat or stealth, and use dialogue, negotiation or force to handle encounters and quests.
Recruit survivors and build a settlement that provides shelter, food and protection. Assign community roles, develop characters’ skills and manage their morale and relationships. Play a hand-crafted story mode or a procedurally generated sandbox; both support online co-op with up to three other players.
Players often enjoy the social simulation: survivors remember actions, form relationships and can generate unexpected stories that make playthroughs feel distinct. Reviews also praise the freedom to develop a settlement, explore or pursue different approaches to survival. Criticism commonly focuses on clunky controls and menus, unreliable NPC behavior, and difficult or uneven combat and raids; some players also object to political messages in the main menu.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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!
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!
Introduces the game world and mechanics with a hand-crafted story. You've come to Moose Valley seeking safety but everything here is falling apart - can you hold a settlement together?
This is the sequel to *Survivalist* (but you don't need to have played it to understand what's going on).
A randomly generated world with a loose story and quests that will vary in different playthroughs. Find a new home and build a community in the post-apocalyptic wilderness.
There is an active modding scene with a large number of different gameplay mods and some all-new stories.
Get up to 3 friends to join and help out in online co-op! (Available in all the above modes, max 4 players)
| Platforms | Windows |
|---|---|
| Achievements | 33 |
| Age ratings |
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| Controller support | PlayStation, Xbox |
| Controller required | No |
| Demo | View demo on Steam |
| Content notices |
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| Website | Official website |
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