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End-times and zombie apocalypses are one of the most popular video game genres, not least since "The Last Of Us". But what if you slept through the entire apocalypse? And what if you then wake up in a world where there really is no one left but yourself? This is the question Dysmantle takes on - and looks at end-time themes and the apocalypse from a completely different angle.

You wake up in an old bunker. Completely without a way and without means. Your only way to survive? Destroying things and crafting new things from the destroyed things. New tools, new food, new clothes. Everything must be produced in this way. And almost everything has to be broken to make new things. Actually, this game principle sounds relatively boring, if it were not for the various tasks, puzzles, and increasing levels of breaking things in Dysmantle.

Although there is a classic leveling system, it does not automatically make you stronger. As you level up, you can learn new skills and blueprints that give you better abilities, weapons or clothing, making you stronger, but also making the game more challenging. Besides the dominating loot elements, the game offers varied puzzles, tower-defense or bullet-hell passages, which are however fairly distributed, fairly repetitive or pleasantly story-heavy.

Story-wise, Dysmantle also comes up with a great "aha" effect. The story is told through small snippets of monologue, radio clips and the side quests that visit the locations that were important before the time of the zombie outbreak. Slowly, the picture of the story comes together, which even with the multitude of new indie titles, shed new light on the topic and rework it differently.

Despite the relatively low price, you can expect 70-90 hours of gameplay, which, admittedly, could have been reduced by about a fifth. Collecting loot is a hard work, but it gets a bit boring towards the end. In the final meters, the game slows down the players once again, which does not quite fit the rest of the games narrative style. All in all, however, Dysmantle is a real surprise title that offers a surprising amount of content for the low price, which is told in a fresh and slightly different way.

Steam Link