Dead Signal

Nobody's coming. The emergency broadcast on 96.3 FM tells everyone to stay indoors and wait for help. Then it goes quiet. Dead Signal is a survival game set in a small American town in the 1990s, built from voxels and rendered like a lost PlayStation disc. You go out anyway, into the fog, with a crowbar and whatever is left in your pockets. [LOOP 1: fight]Fight up close Ready a swing and aim it, then let it go. Raise your weapon to guard, catch a blow at the last instant to parry and stagger the attacker, and shove to make space. Every hit lands on a specific part of a body, and bodies fall the way bodies do. - Melee that weighs something: crowbars, kitchen knives, claw hammers, machetes, baseball bats, fire axes and sledgehammers. Each one has its own reach, speed and stamina cost, and wears down with use. - Guard, parry, shove: block attacks from the front, parry to stagger, shove to break an attack before it lands. - Guns are loud: a 9 mm pistol, a .38 revolver, a quiet .22 rifle and two shotguns, each with its own reload and noise. Every shot tells the street where you are. [LOOP 2: loot]Take what you need Every kitchen cupboard, medicine cabinet, wardrobe and shop shelf holds real, finite supplies. Food is in kitchens, medicine is in bathrooms and clothes are in wardrobes. Searching takes time. Your pockets and backpack have real weight and volume limits, so you decide what comes home. - Search everything: kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, upstairs rooms and the shops on the main street. - Patch yourself up: bandages, antiseptic and painkillers, used on the wound that needs them. - Eat, drink, repair: hunger and thirst creep up, and broken gear can be fixed with a multitool and scrap. [LOOP 3: the infected]The infected Shredded, filthy, and no two alike. Five kinds of infected stalk Thompsonville, each with its own look and its own eye glow, and that glow cuts straight through the fog. They see what is in front of them and hear what is loud. Footsteps, doors, searching and gunfire all carry different distances, and walls muffle them. When they hear something, they come to look. [LOOP 4: Thompsonville]Thompsonville Four seeded blocks of streets: family homes and two-storey houses with real stairs, fenced yards, and a main street with a convenience store, a pharmacy and a hardware store. Some houses are lived-in, some abandoned, some burnt out, and some turned into makeshift shelters. Some hold what happened when the broadcast stopped. Doors open, close, break and can be barricaded. A full day passes in twelve minutes, and the night is darker than you think.Bleed like it matters Under the voxels is a full body: organs, arteries and veins, blood loss and pain. A deep cut keeps bleeding until you stop it. Lose enough blood and you go down. Call for help, and a friend or another survivor can drag you to cover and treat you with real supplies.Not alone Play solo or with a friend in two-player co-op. Other survivors live their own lives in town: they scavenge, treat their own wounds, defend themselves and help the hurt, whether you are there or not.