Cozombie: a cozy game about the end of the world
I made a game. It’s called Cozombie, and it’s a cozy idle game for iOS and Android about restoring shelters after the end of the world, and keeping the dead out of them at night.
You find a ruin, clear it out room by room, wire in some lights and slowly turn it into a home. The first one is four dry rooms slung under a dead highway bridge.
Every room goes through the same stages: clean up, repair, power, furnish, make it cozy. Finishing a room switches on its perk. A bedroom sleeps two, a workshop builds faster. Cozy shelters attract survivors, each with a name, a knack and a favourite thing. They wish for things (a bath, a kite, a look at the sea), make friends and eat supper together at dusk. Sooner or later a cat turns up.
There is one rule the whole game hangs on: the dead go to the brightest light. Not to people, not to noise. And you are the brightest light. The first lamp you switch on is seen for miles, and the cozier your windows get, the more of them come looking.
So by day you build and prepare. Every few nights they come as a crowd, along your barricade, and the forecast tells you how: all from the left, runners first, a screamer leading. There are ten kinds, and each wants a different answer. Whatever your turrets and the night watch don’t stop, you tap. Rain thins them, fog hides them, and a night of snow needs a stove and wood put by.
When you move on, the shelter you leave becomes a bakery, a timber yard or an infirmary and keeps sending you what it makes. There are twenty shelters on the road north, from a nook under a bridge to a lighthouse, a stranded ferry, a snowbound lodge and a vault in a mountain. Each one learns a trick of its own: the lighthouse beam slows whatever it sweeps, the crane drops a container on the thickest of the crowd.
There is a story too, told in small pieces between jobs: a woman on the radio at the end of the road who counts your lights, notes signed “M.” left by someone a few days ahead, letters from the people you left behind. Piece by piece you find out what happened at ten past four, six years ago, and what the beacon in the mountains is for.
And on the nights nobody comes, there are marshmallows round the fire pit, cocoa on the sofa and stargazing from the watch tower. Or you can just sit, hide everything, and watch the rain on the roof.
The first three shelters are free for as long as you like. One purchase opens the rest of the road. No ads, no timers, no account, and nothing leaves your phone.
It’s built with plain JavaScript and Capacitor, with the scenes rendered and the lights, weather and night sky drawn on top as SVG. It’s on its way to the App Store and Google Play. I’ll post here when it’s out.
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