NOTE: this was originally posted on my Tumblr blog
Released on the fitting day of October 31st, Dangerous Fellows is a zombie survival game by Lucydream! It was released for both Android and iOS and is the first global release for this developer.
The premise is basically that you are a high school survivor during a sudden zombie apocalypse and while looking for some resources you stumble on a group of 5 good looking guys, all the same age. They save you from a zombie encounter and take you back to their base, where you meet other survivors around the same age as you.
There are some major spoilers abound, so read at your own risk underneath the cut
So, let me start off by saying that it’s been a while a game has hooked me this badly. The biggest thing here is that you actually could potentially run through the story in a matter of hours, but you’d have to pay. Now, going free to play isn’t completely impossible, but it will take a considerable stretch of time. You can get rubies every day, which helps, but you would definitely be playing a serious waiting game if you just waited for those.
Let’s talk about gameplay a little bit here. It’s a visual novel, so at it’s most basic you pick a choice and depending on what you pick, you get a certain amount of affection points with one of the love interests and if you accumulate enough points you can get their ending. You can get these items called ‘hints’ that basically tell you which choice will yield the most affection points, or which is the ‘best’ choice. You’ll have 3 critical episodes where you’ll be in some dangerous situations that call for a couple things. One is an outfit that’s appropriate for the situation (which requires rubies to purchase), and then you’ll have time limited choices you need to make. I saved a lot of my hints for those as you only have a few seconds. I didn’t quite learn yet what happens if you make a wrong choice though … but selecting the best choice results in an affection increase with all the love interests!
During some of the episodes you’ll also encounter some ruby choices. Selecting those nets you some extra affection with the love interest who is giving this choice and gives you an extra scene with them. Are they worth it? Well~ that’s primarily subjective, as you can raise their affection by giving them items. Items can be obtained by doing repairs around the school, which take 3 hours, and you can get items and hints from that.
Basically, unless if you’re very patient, you will probably end up spending some money on this game.
Now, moving onto the actual story …
I love it.
I did not expect to love it as much as I did.
I’m a pretty big scaredy cat when it comes to horror games, so I wasn’t sure if I’d even finish this, but none of the art is scary. Even though there’s zombies, the sprites for them are pretty generic, which works in my favor since I don’t have to look at something too scary. The sounds definitely help make up for it, and I recommend headphones when playing! The music and sounds really add to the chilly atmosphere of the story and I don’t find the music to be too repetitive.
There aren’t really a whole lot of variations with choices. The story stays fairly the same regardless of affection levels and you get two patrol episodes that lets you spend some extra time with your chosen love interest. The thing with those is that since there’s progression of time as you go through the episodes, if you want to unlock one love interest’s illustrations, you’d have to do both patrol episodes with them and their ending. If you choose one love interest for the first patrol episode you’d get their first illustration. If you choose a different one for the second patrol episode, you’ll get their second illustration.
Regardless, their nice little vignettes to get to know the characters and while I do like them, they do sometimes feel like a hard turn from the main story. Then again, sometimes you need some levity in a story like this. The story is pretty depressing. These are essentially kids who are in a very stressful situation and the future looks terribly bleak. Their dinners consist of buns and candy bars because there’s nothing else for them they can really eat that will last.
On top of their isolation and the whole zombie problem, there’s another problem. When one of the survivors go missing, tensions start to rise, and you watch as the already small group starts to disintegrate further and further.
For me, that’s when the story started to really pick up and I wanted to know what happens next? It’s not until near the end that you find out if there are other survivors outside of the school or if there’s any hope for these kids. The ending I found was a little anticlimactic. It happened very quickly, and if you’re hoping for something really sappy and romantic, this really isn’t it. However, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing either. For starters, they are pretty much strangers who happened to get through a very tense situation together and saw it through to the end. If anything really romantic was going to happen, I’d assume it would be after things settle down. The biggest miss for me is that there’s still a mystery that is left unresolved with the ending, but I assume it gets figured out the more endings you finish.
So, with that said, as an otome game ehhhhhhh I mean, it falls a little short. It’s not bad, but if you want your romance fix, this definitely isn’t it.
However, if you want a good thriller, I definitely think this fits the bill.
I still have some more endings I need to get so I might revisit this again in the future.
Cloud Dreamer 