For the past couple of years, there have many fears surrounding the Brexit. Most of them relate to the subject of economical breakdown or hearsays of Britain becoming a fascist state. So far the fear we haven’t heard of is Brexit causing a zombie apocalypse. It seems a bit too absurd, doesn’t it?  This is where today’s game comes in; Ghoul Britannia: Land of Hope and Gorey developed and published by Binary Space. It is an Early Access point and clicks adventure set in post-apocalyptic Brexit Britain infested with zombies. The game has been in development for 2 years with the development team consisting of a mere ten people including Jonathan L. Howard as the writer.

The current early access version consists of 4 chapters and the team has announced that they will be releasing chapters 5 and 6 in the upcoming months. It is scheduled for a full release on February 2020, consisting of 10 chapters in total.

The game follows the story of Hope Andrews, a young woman separated from her family, residing in the city of Weston. Things take a turn when the isolationist British government’s plan to re-establish its declining economy goes off-course. To bolster a badly-depleted workforce after its departure from the European Union, the government comes up with a shrewd plan of exploiting the dead and forcing its people to sell their deceased ones and turning them into ELUs or Extensive Labour Units to do the menial jobs that no normal Britons would do.

The plan goes awry when the government’s control tower for controlling all the ELUs crashes and all ELUs turn into mindless killing machines, causing a nation-wide plague of the undead. Hope sets out on a quest to reunite with her family and on her path she stumbles upon David Gorey, an ELU spokesperson turned into a cognizant zombie who offers Hope help to discover the truth behind the undead apocalypse.

Moving on to the first impressions, so far in my 2 hours of the playthrough, my experience has been not so great, it’s more of a mixed bag. There are a few bright spots but the pacing of the whole thing kind of ruins the overall experience. Hope’s interactions with the NPCs in the game remains the highlight. I found myself rushing through each puzzle sequence so that I could get to the next dialogue section. During a dialogue sequence, you can select any dialogue out the choices provided. Though the narrative and the plot remains one of its strongest suits, it can be said that many won’t be able to connect to the tone of its narrative of the near-future dystopian setting. The plot is quite hysterical and absurdly comedic one rather than a horror driven adventure.

The visuals of the game are pretty decent, it uses 3D models of the playable character and NPCs mapped onto a 2D environment. The game’s visuals are not at all taxing in any way and nothing that a potato pc can’t handle. For the most part, the visuals are like that of bobbleheads moving on an artistic plane.

As for the gameplay, it is what you can expect from a typical point and click adventure title. For puzzle solving, the game incorporates an inventory for Hope that can store a maximum of 10 items at a time. Items have to be searched manually without any hints being dropped by the game. My playthrough time could have been shortened by half if the developers had implemented a system in which the necessary items get highlighted when the cursor hovers upon them. But purists of the genre will find this a welcome feature.

I’m not much of a fan of the kind of puzzles this game has to offer. While solving any puzzle during my playthrough, each second just added to my boredom and I grew weary of my patience as a progressed through one level to another. The game has several puzzles that demand to scrounge several items through the game’s environment. It offered too little content and demanded too much exploration considering the patience and effort required. However, if you are into undead satires and bear an awkwardly dark sense of humor, this just might be your piece of cake.

Besides the mind-boggling puzzles, I’m really curious regarding how the narrative will take place in the post-early-access chapters. To be honest, I have 1-2 chapters in my backlog currently. Still doesn’t kill my curiosity regarding the premise of the game or how Hope and Dave’s friendship unfolds. Whose behind the sinister plot of the zombie apocalypse? Is it the EU or is it the Labour Party that has a hand in making things worse? There are a lot of questions surrounding the fate of Britannia.

About the Author

Subhasish “4K” Das

Despite his nickname of ‘4K’, the guy has been a low-spec gamer for most of his life. The guy can literally sit through long hours of cut-scenes and still won’t break a sweat. He is a lore junkie when it comes to open-world titles and hack-n-slash titles. Still he doesn’t shy away from trying out underrated indie titles from time to time.