Like many other players, in celebration of Halloween I like to find some haunting new title to creep me out or thrill me, all in the spirit of the ghoulish holiday. This year's finding is The Outbreak, a live-action, choose your own adventure style game that follows the adventure of a small group of people as they try to survive a zombie outbreak. Part Night of the Living Dead and part Resident Evil, this is a curious little title that offers a little bit of fun in an intriguing container.

I should note up front that The Outbreak is not for the squeamish. It's clear from the get-go that a lot of effort was put into making the films that make up the game as grotesque as possible. Over the course of the short movies you'll see brains splatter, intestines ripped out and fed upon, walking corpses that look like corpses, and more. Where a lot of survival horror gets its thrills from suspense and anticipation, the play style of The Outbreak doesn't really allow this, so the creators ramped up the gore factor as compensation. If zombie-fests like Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake aren't for you, then neither is this game.

I'm not usually a fan of "choose your own adventure" style games, frequently feeling like there just isn't enough control to justify it being a game. That feeling holds true here. You watch a video and then are given two choices. Your choice leads you to a new video where more events play out and you either live, die, or get more choices. The game has a total of 21 videos, with eight different endings. With only two of those endings leading to survival, the odds are definitely stacked against the player. But isn't that the way it should be in a survival-horror game?

While there isn't a lot of depth to the gameplay (and frankly, what is here is only slightly removed from classics like Dragon's Lair, which holds the added challenge of having to press the button at the right time), The Outbreak does make it easy to go back to previous choices. In fact, when you reach the end (either through life or death), you can opt to press a scene selection button that lays out all the paths you've been down, allowing you to go back and revisit any scene you want or take a different path through the story. The feature reminds me of the old days of actually reading "choose your own adventure" books, where I'd keep ample bookmarks on hand so I could go back and make other choices. This is clearly an easier method of backtracking.

As a movie person, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk a little bit about the scenes that make up the game. There's a reason I chose Night of the Living Dead and Resident Evil as my points of comparison above. The acting in The Outbreak relates pretty well to those survival horror pioneers, which isn't exactly a compliment. Some of the actors do well by their characters, which is a pretty easy task considering how flat many of the survivalists are. Others could use some practice, and one of the players is so bad that I almost always chose the path that would get me away from her, despite knowing how that might turn out. Much like the gore, profanity runs rampant through the videos as some sort of substitution for the missing tension, as if shouting the f-bomb enough times will heighten the drama and danger of the situation.

While The Outbreak's short, basic gameplay makes it really friendly for casual players, the high gore and profanity content reduce its potential audience quite a bit. It's a brief piece of survival-horror entertainment designed to capture the attention of zombie fanatics, but there's no real reason to repeat the game once you've worked your way through it. As a Halloween treat, the game is a welcome distraction, but I can't imagine recommending the game to many friends or co-workers, and outside of the creepy atmosphere of October, I don't know that I would have noticed this game much at all.

Play The Outbreak online at SurviveTheOutbreak.com.

Final Score: D