Instinct is a 2007 First-Person Shooter developed by Digital Spray Studios (who also made You Are Empty) and Newtonic Studio and published by Noviy Disk (in Russia; it was later released in North America by Wild Hare Entertainment), one which is Very Loosely Based on a True Story (emphasis on very, artistic license be damned), notably from what was supposedly a nuclear blast from a faulty weapons test in North Korea, circa 2004. note
Years after a mysterious, mushroom-cloud spawning explosion rocked the mountainous regions of North Korea, a team of elite Spec-ops soldiers are sent to the region to investigate after receiving reports of possible illicit experimentations involving biological weapons and viral warfare.
Infiltrating a top-secret North Korean weapons facility, they are met with opposition from North Korean soldiers and further into the site's interiors... zombies?
Notably, the English version of the game doesn't bother to have English dialogue, instead retaining the original Russian dialogue with subtitles. While the marketing for the game claims this was done "to honor the cultural authenticity" of the game, it's pretty clear it was done to save money because it's a budget title.
No relation to the TV series or the film.
September 8th, 2004. 16:03.
Yangado Province, North Korea.
12 Hours and 20 Minutes before the Explosion...
- Air-Vent Passageway: A few stages see you crawling through vents to sneak around the facility.
- Anachronic Order: The levels aren't played in chronological order, so stages can be set in the present or weeks before the explosion and suddenly skip to a few months later. Before skipping back to the past, and so forth.
- And Then John Was a Zombie: In the final stage, you escaped the facility as everything blows up behind you. But in the last minute, the camera pans before your character, showing you bearing the same visage as the undead creatures and that you've been infected. And you're heading for the nearest human city...
- Automatic Door Malfunction: A lethal version; one of the areas has a malfunctioning, automated sliding door covered in blood, which crushes everything that tries crossing and turning zombies coming from the other room into a pile of red stuff. You'll need to find a control panel to stop said door momentarily before dashing through, but take note that said door can suddenly reactivate and squash you.
- Battle Strip: You perform one in the final cutscene, effortlessly ripping off your armor and shirt... to expose your bare chest that contains the same veins and skin color as seen on the infected.
- Body Armor as Hit Points: You can collect a vest that acts as a second layer of health; it absorbs hits from enemies partially and reduce the damage you're taking to the point where a single shotgun blast only deals 2% of damage!
- Crowbar Combatant: Interestingly enough, despite being part of some military force, your character's default melee weapon is a crowbar. It's surprisingly effective in smashing out the skulls of zombies and North Korean soldiers alike to save ammo.
- Gang Up on the Human: Most of the time, if there are zombies and still-surviving North Korean soldiers onscreen, they'll immediately target the player for no reason. That said, there is an area where you can raise an alarm attracting some North Korean soldiers into a zombie-infested morgue and let them fight it out.
- Gatling Good: The mini-gun, which comes with clips of 500 rounds at a time and can fire away without reloading until it's dry. What's even better is that you obtain it as early as the first stage.
- Mooks, but no Bosses: Not a single boss fight the whole game.
- Rodents of Unusual Size: More than one section of the facility contains gigantic, white lab rats which attack by gnawing at your legs.
- Sentry Gun: A few areas in the research facility have gatling turrets which drop from the ceiling upon activation, and blast away at the player on sight. Those areas are, unsurprisingly, devoid of zombies.
- Shoot the Television: In the opening credits, the player character - a soldier who's apparently in the aftermath of a failed relationship - angrily hurls his beer bottle at the television broadcasting news of the stray nuclear explosion in North Korea, destroying the whole television screen in the process.
- Synthetic Plague: The zombie virus, a top-secret North Korean project, is made in a lab before it inevitably leaks and spread out of control.
- To Serve Man: The undead enemies enjoy feasting on human flesh. There are several areas in research labs where the player can come across groups of undead chewing away at humans restrained on beds and operating tables, where they're mostly too busy eating to notice the player.
- Zombie Infectee: You can come across a scientist who used to be one of the facility's researchers (and a Russian, surprisingly - how he ends up in a North Korean biolab is beyond anyone's guess) who details you on the outbreak's backstory, that he's one of the last survivors and by entering the area you're already infected, due to the virus being airborne. He'll give you an antidote that suppresses zombification before blowing his own brains out, but from what the final cutscene shows, it didn't work...
