19th Level

With a two week break between classes at Brandeis, I had a little bit of time to goof off and make use of the PS4 I received as a birthday gift last month. I finally made my way through Naughty Dog's The Last of Us . This isn't really a review of the game, there's about a gazillion out there on the internet - though I will give a brief overview of it. I'll also note there are spoilers about the game in this post so if you've not played it and want to play it unspoiled, you should read no farther. A bit unlikely for a game released in 2013, but just in case... The Last of Us tells the tale of Joel and Ellie in a post-apocalyptic world. Joel is a survivor of the original outbreak in his late forties. Ellie is 14 and for unknown reasons, is immune to the infection. In September of 2013 a mutant Cordyceps fungus wipes out civilization.  Cordyceps is a real kind of fungus and is a parasite, with some species able to alter the host's behavior. Luckily for us, ...

Over the past few days I've seen some previews for Immersion RPG 's upcoming Infected  RPG, set in a world crawling its way out of a zombie apocalypse. Now to be honest, their website does have an amusingly bold declaration: " We are a pen and paper Role Playing Game company in the final stages of creating the most exciting system and settings you’ve ever played."  Their starting RPG, Infected , is due to launch on Kickstarter in about a week. To be honest, it was the artwork that first caught my eye, being strongly reminiscent of the Playstation game The Last of Us. From reading the reviewer/preview copy at their website, I see Infected  takes place a few years after the outbreak of a zombie epidemic. It started with a kind of superflu which put people into a coma that slowly slid towards death - a coma they sometimes "recovered" from as zombies. It's a bit of a change from the infection vectors in The Walking Dead by making it more of a vi...