Every time I step into the shopping mall’s central park I’m gripped by fear, as the same pop rock song kicks in and I know a trio of psychopaths will start screaming at me in their military jeep, with a turret and everything. As if the hundreds of zombies weren’t bad enough.
Dead Rising, originally released in 2006, is one of the best zombie video games ever made – a delightfully satirical action game that drops you into a zombie-infested mall and tasks you with surviving for three days. It’s a game filled with friction and complex systems, demanding the player engage with its time management while trying to save as many survivors as they can, and uncover the conspiracy at the heart of everything. There’s quite literally nothing else like Dead Rising, and that fact has helped it become something of a cult classic, one with quite a few rough edges. But those rough edges have now been sanded down and done away with in Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, a phenomenal update to the original game that upgrades it from a cult classic, to simply one of the best games ever made.
