Try to survive waves of zombies in a haunted house in this single screen classic arcade styled game.  Living Dead House is available on Switch and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.

There are two main modes of play in Living Dead House.  Arcade has you complete stages by surviving for a limited amount of time before the sun comes up and you move to the next stage.  Survival Mode has you trying to last as long as you can endlessly.  You are in a single screen house and can move left and right and up and down ladders and stairs.  You must try and avoid the zombies because if they touch you, you’ll lose a life.  Lose them all and it’s Game Over.

There are pickups you can nab to give you an edge.  Some are single use weapons like an axe or shotgun.  Others let you interact with the environment like a switch to electrocute the zombies or a hammer and nails to board up places where they can pop in.  You can play one or two player local co-op and post your scores to leaderboards.

My only real problem with the game is that they don’t really give you any instructions.  I had to figure out what the items do and I don’t know if there are any gameplay elements I may have missed.  While this game was a bit too hard, I did like how it felt like a classic arcade game that really could’ve came out in the mid 80s.

Kid Factor:

Living Dead House is rated T for Teen with ESRB descriptors of Blood and Violence.  You do shoot at zombies and hit them with other weapons, too.  Pieces of them will fly around and if you get hit, you’ll just fall over.  I really didn’t notice any blood.  But the pixelated graphics negated a lot of the violence, so I’d probably be OK with older kids playing this.

Tags: Game Reviews