A downloadable game

This is the Zone -- a post-apocalyptic world where strangeness and confusion are the norm, filled with treasure, danger, exploration and strategic card battles.

Advance through environments filled with deadly anomalies and twisted abominations. Unearth artifacts of incomprehensible power, and use them. Develop your psionic abilities to the limit and blow away your enemies with the power of your mind.

Inspired by games such as Slay the Spire, S.T.A.L.K.E.R and Darkest Dungeon, The Zone seeks to seamlessly blend exploration, deckbuilding, card battles and RPG elements, all with a rich visual-novel-style story crafted by industry veterans (Mount&Blade, The Next World).


FEATURES

  • Gorgeous hand-drawn art
  • Gripping story told in slick visual novel style
  • A wonderul, dangerous world to explore
  • Deep inventory management - Assemble your deck and abilities by carefully choosing your equipment, even changing everything in mid-combat
  • Hundreds of different items and abilities to mix and create your perfect playstyle

NOTICE

This is a pre-alpha gameplay demo to give an impression of what the project is like. If you want to support development, you can wishlist Zone on Steam, keep an eye out for our upcoming Kickstarter, and/or follow and let us know on Twitter! You'll have our eternal thanks.

More information

Development log

Comments

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Loot Saga4 years ago(+1)

Congrats on the kickstarter campaign. The latest version of the demo played really well! 

Things I liked:

- The writing is really well done in the latest version. Having a few dialogue options is great and the voicing per encounter was consistent. World text is very articulate and well written.

- The combat balance has gotten better. 

- Selecting map to return to city and returning to the spot you left from is a great mechanic. This plays well because of the slow movement.

- Quests are great to have, the town itself feels like a traditional base of operations.

Nice to have:

- Clickable environment path. I'd love to just click on a location and let my stalker walk himself there instead of holding down wsad.

- Auto end turn if i'm out of cards

- Possibly more stats for my stalker in addition to research perks. I'm imagining something like this:

Strength stat: Can pry open doors / break boxes open

Int Stat: hack computers / mess with machinery

Speed: walk faster

Charisma: Dialogue options

Sense: Extends ring that shows you interactable objects when you get close (sense in general would be great to have less guessing on the main map).


Bugs:

Battle screen glitched to black when entering combat fairly opten. Happens when extending window when in windowed mode too. Fixes itself when tabbing out and back in.


- Minor: Scrolling over required item squishy antler in research, Alien Fibres for example, then scrolling over another research path (chemistry) it then showed the antlers as a required item until I scrolled over that section. It then returned to expected required items none. 

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zefredz4 years ago

I really enjoyed this demo, especially the graphics and the game design. So I hope my comments will not sound too negative :)

In addition to what @MadRobotGames said, I think the ennemies are sometimes too powerful and thus the death rate can be very high. This is a bit frustrating. For example I died 4 times just to cross one section of the map because my HPs where too low to manage to survive that much combats. 

To overcome this I think there should be a way to regain HPs faster between combats and/or the option to flee during combat (at the expense of HPs or inventory items for instance).

Not really an issue, but it could also be great not to have to choose which ennemy to attack when there is only one left.

Nevertheless, I can't wait to test the next updates of this game :)

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Illuminated Games4 years ago

No offence taken! This is a pre-alpha demo, we've not really given any effort to balancing yet, but you can rest assured we'll do our best to make any release version feel fair -- or if it isn't, we'll be listening and acting on player input to make it so.

Thanks for giving Zone a try, it means a lot, and I'm really glad you've enjoyed it so far.

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zefredz4 years ago(+2)

I've just played the last update. You've made a lot of improvements ! Great job ! :) I can't wait to see what's coming next  !

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MadRobotGames4 years ago(+2)

First of all Mount Blade and Slay The Spire are my favouirite games and i am also game dev making deckbuilding game. I like the game but there is something i must tell. Wandering around map is really messy. You cant use mouse and character is extremely slow. It feels very bad. Lastly I like the battle and inventory system a lot.

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Illuminated Games4 years ago(+1)

Thanks for the kind words! Obviously what you've been playing is a very, very early demo -- almost everything about it is still being worked on, and stuff like the map movement will definitely be polished much more in future.

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