Zelter (PC, Early Access)
Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor
You either already know the J-POP/power metal band BABYMETAL, in which case they need no introduction, or you don’t, in which case there is no hope of me explaining them to you. They’re such a huge internet phenomenon that even if you live just on the outskirts of Gamerland you’ve probably run across their viral megahit “- ギミチョコ！！- Gimme chocolate!!” at least once, if only to appreciate the “what the hell is going on here” factor. My favorite version is probably the one they did with Dragonforce, because, well, guitar solos. There have been a few attempts to codify their genre-defying brand of bubbly pop and sounds from across the metalverse, but my favorite is “kawaiicore”—it encapsulates this alchemical melding of kawaii cuteness with the “-core” of, you know, hardcore. Metalcore. Grindcore. Their music isn’t technically any of those genres, but you get it, right? Cooooore. It’s scary. It’s thunderous. It’s tough. And cute as hell.
G1 Playground’s Zelter, currently in early access on Steam, is one of a rash of recent video games to try their hand at what I’ve come to call a kawaiicore gaming aesthetic, mixing cute pixel art with blood, death, and (in the case of Zelter) zombies. It’s not exactly the same thing, but it’s at least spiritually related to Spiritfarer, previewed a few weeks ago by yours truly, which is a bright and sunny game about death and dying, or maybe The Last Campfire, where the adorable cartoony Ember character steals from a crumbling skeleton within the first minutes of gameplay. It’s as if there is something about all the real-world horror and anxiety we’ve gone through this year that games are tapping into by combining the cute and the fearsome together.
So, given this set of related aesthetic interests, what does Zelter bring to the table? Well, zombies, for one. The combination of pixel art with imminent zombie attack was really the big draw for me to try out the game in early access, as I suspect it was for most players. And the art is really fun, making the game feel both cute and deadly at once. You can also rescue people from the nearby town to come back and help you out with the daily tasks of surviving the apocalypse. While the final version of the NPC mechanics will probably be more robust than it is now, I can easily see this leading to that Left4Dead feeling that you’re part of an ad hoc family.
Zelter also has a crafting system in which you follow a branching tree of available items that you collect along the way, which is meant to prepare you for the day when (slight spoiler but come on, what were you expecting) the zombies find your base and start breaking your doors down. So, if you want to build a barricade, first you’re going to need some sticks, which you can find out in the world, and then you need a workbench, and then you have to find or make tools before you can build a bed, which lets you unlock the list of things you need to build the barricade, at which point you head out for…more sticks. To be fair, I haven’t had a playthrough yet that lasted me more than a few days of game time. The NPCs are also clearly intended to take a lot of this burden off the player, but you do spend quite a bit of time in Zelter gathering sticks.
Which broaches the issue of realism that always comes up in playing at the apocalypse. In the real zombie cataclysm which we all know is going to round out 2020 after the murder hornets have had their say, would there just be bullets lying around? Probably not. It makes a certain kind of sense that I would need to build a furnace and find some scrap iron and melt it down somehow (although, how would I know how to do all that? The real apocalypse version of me would die the way he lived—playing Skyrim until the tortilla chips were gone). The top-down combat system that lets you aim with the cursor anywhere visible on the screen is also really handy. Some problems that other reviewers on Steam have noted, at least in the beta I played, is that there is functionally no ability to sneak and once the zombies see you they don’t seem to ever stop chasing you. This means that you can get a whole string of them to chase you around, which is hilarious, but it also means that after you have had your fun, you will most definitely die.
Ultimately, between all of the crafting and the help you need from the NPCs to advance beyond the first couple of days in the game, I think that Zelter will appeal to those who always wished that Age of Empires had zombies in it. To me, it plays more like a real-time strategy game than anything else, with its heavy emphasis on resources—which, don’t get me wrong, demands a central place in any apocalyptic game, but this is a game for those who really kept an accurate tally of every arrow Daryl shot in The Walking Dead and whether or not he got it back. You also have a very cute, dare I say kawaii kitty zipper on your backpack, which is handily already splattered in gore for when those hard-won barricades finally fall.
Read our other recent impressions of Spelunky 2 and Ghostrunner. And why not listen to the first episode of our podcast, the Gamers with Glasses Show!
