Zafehouse Diaries 2
Zafehouse Diaries is back!
The cult hit from 2012 is now bigger, better and more terrifying than ever. Take control of a group of people – each with their own skills, motivations and prejudices – and try to survive the zombie apocalypse.
Every hour, designate tasks for your handful of survivors and then read what happens in your dynamically updating diary.
There are several different scenarios. Most are based around achieving an objective: get to the rescue point, repair a car, stop the military. But others are open-ended and can be played for as long as you can survive.
Features
- Every story is unique: Each game is procedurally generated – will your survivors work well together and complete their objectives?
- Ordinary people, extraordinary situations: Keep your survivors happy and motivated, or they’ll turn on each other
- All new engine: Zafehouse Diaries has been upgraded in every way. Full widescreen support, high resolution, a 3D environment and multiplatform support
- More of everything: Loads of new items, orders, events, occupations, dilemmas and scenarios
- Increased control: Equip your survivors and determine how they defend and breach locations
Play it your way
Zafehouse Diaries 2 has a wide range of customisation options. There are many ways to adjust the game’s difficulty and add custom content, including survivors, occupations and items.
- Custom game options: Change variety of gameplay options, from item distribution and zombie strength, to relationships and dilemmas
- Survivors: Create your own survivors and configure their occupation, gender, sexuality and more. Choose from dozens of built-in portraits or import your own
- Group creator: Customise special groups of survivors – including their prejudices – to control exactly who you want in your game
- Occupations: Add new occupations, configure their bonuses, and assign them to your custom survivors
- Item editor: Design new items, import photos and even add your own sound effects
FAQ for Zafehouse players
How does Zafehouse Diaries 2 differ from the original?
At its core, Zafehouse Diaries 2 is the same strategic drama simulator as the original, but it expands on it in every way: added content, upgraded engine, more surprises, more madness.
I loved the original. Will I like this?
Yes! We’ve taken all the great bits that our fans loved about the original, smoothed out the rough edges, and expanded on it. While we’ve added some extra complexity around combat and orders, we’ve also made the systems quick and easy to use, and included a smart set of defaults if you just want to go with the flow.
What are some of the new gameplay features?
You have more control over how your survivors breach and investigate locations. You can also equip your survivors with a weapon that they will always use.
Some orders have more granular options – if you notice zombies massing to the north, then you can focus your barricading efforts on north-facing entrances.
We’ve also overhauled many parts of the interface so it’s easy to see what’s going on. The most obvious example is the location layout, but you can also easily check your survivors’ skills, injuries and special modifiers.
Are survivor relationships important?
Absolutely. We’ve refined the system so you can have more ways to change relationships. In addition to the rumour system, we’ve added a new option: redemptions.
This involves one survivor being asked to do certain tasks to ‘redeem’ themselves in the eyes of another, which removes a prejudice. It’s also more obvious what might happen to relationships during a dilemma, so you can tactically choose an option that improves relationships.
Is combat still brutal?
Combat is still the most dangerous aspect of the game, but you have more control over breaching. For example, you can equip survivors and select how cautious they should be while breaching. Furthermore, survivors are more likely to flee if things are looking pretty grim. If you still find it hard, then you can tweak the difficulty settings.
Steam User 0
Survive the zombie apocalypse. What more needs to be said?
Okay, well, this is a survival game told mostly through the journal and actions you direct the characters to do. If you need swish 3D graphics, this ain't for you. If you have an attention span however, the game has a boardgame type of feel as you direct your survivor(s) to search, barricade, and loot buildings as you either wait out for rescue, or attempt to secure your own way out of the town.
Zafehouse Diaries 1 & 2 are go to casual games for me.
Steam User 0
I love this game. I never progress/succeed, but I just keep playing and playing it, and failing, and restarting. I wish there were more games like this, but have not been able to find anything similar. I love the background sound of it, the little piano, the atmosphere. When I'm not playing it, I'm thinking about it.
The only thing that annoys me is that when you switch to the second monitor, the game is minimised, and window mode doesn't really work properly (it's one of those windows that can't be resized by normal window controls, but have to be set with a resolution from inside the game, so never really fits properly).
Steam User 0
So close to perfection
I remember wanting to play the original game so badly as a kid but I never could so finally getting around to playing both is awesome but the game is held back just barely by lack of development time.
The best part of both games is the customisation, being able to chuck whatever people you want into a zombie appocalypse and trying to survive is really fun and with its more story based approach it leaves the details of what's happening to your imagination instead of trying to show you it which works really well and allows you to imagine what might actually be going on instead of a half assed attempt at showing you.
It falls just short of perfection though with how much customisation the game allows, for some reason the first game allowed you to create custom images for locations but this is completely missing in the sequel which makes no sense. It was barebones in the original but just being able to add your own photos of places makes the game more unique and open-ended.
I said earlier that the game lacked enough development time, I noticed this because the game does actually have the code to support custom events! There are templates for all different types of events so I could imagine the devs could have allowed us to create them ourselves.
As the game stands it's still really fun and immersive and you can easily lose a bunch of time it's just a shame that they didn't spend more time on extending the original experience rather than just giving it a fresher coat of paint.