Mist Survival is a Wide-Open Sandbox Zombie Survival Sandbox game by Dimension 32 Entertainment, which is essentially a single self-taught programmer who really wanted to make a Zombie Survival game and learned to code in Unreal Engine 4 to do so. The game's primary focus is on a single-player PvE experience, with exploration, crafting, and base-building. The game came out on Steam's Early Access program in August 15, 2018.
The game takes place years after the end of human civilization, caused by a mysterious mist that caused most of humanity to sicken and die and caused most of the survivors to mutate into murderous flesh-eating mutants. As one of the few immune still-human survivors, you must survive in the new world.
By day you're free to explore the world, but need to be careful of bears and enemy NPC bandits, while by night or when the mist rolls in you need to seek shelter as the mutants come out when the sun is gone. You can claim a home base and even recruit NPC housemates to help you defend and maintain your base.
Mist Survival contains examples of:
- After the End: Human civilization has collapsed and what remains of humanity seems to consist of you, a few dozen bandits, and 3 other friendly survivors. Later updates have added a couple more friends and some neutral survivors that you can run across and trade with.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Unlike most games in the genre, the game has manual saving and doesn't automatically autosave when you die, so you can recover from bad circumstances just by loading your save file.
- Annoying Arrows: Played straight with wood practice arrows, which do Scratch Damage. Averted with hunting arrows, which can kill a bandit with a single torso hit and kill a mutant with 2 torso hits or a headshot when fired from a longbow.
- Bears Are Bad News: Bears roam the game world and can be quite a threat to an unprepared player; they run faster than you do, can withstand well over a dozen 9mm headshots or axe swings, and can tear you apart with their claws quite quickly. Two shotgun blasts will kill them, though, and they thankfully can't climb stairs or reach you if you climb atop a tall object.
- Boss Battle: A boss mutant known as the Berserker can be found in the northeast mine. It uses charging melee attacks and also throws boulders at you. Patch 0.4 adds the Tank in the southeast highway tunnel, a tall, bald mutant with a mutated arm who rather resembles Tyrant, and who can run, throw barrels, and even use a firearm!
- Breakable Weapons: Weapons and armor have durability and will break with use. Armor wears out particularly quickly, with a bulletproof vest degrading completely after only a handful of hits (which, admittedly, is Truth in Television).
- Canine Companion: A pet dog that can follow you around and even wear doggy armor was added in 2022.
- Continuing is Painful: Respawning will cause you to lose some items from your inventory, and your home base may be raided by bandits.
- Deep South: The fact that many bandits sport Confederate Flag T-shirts would strongly suggest this.
- Glass Cannon: Both you and enemy bandits die quite quickly, dying after only a few torso shots or a single headshot, but can kill just as quickly.
- Guide Dang It!: Averted with game version 0.5.0 and up which actually has an in-game map that can be used. If you happen to have a pencil, you can mark points of interest and your exact location.
- There is no compass, so you sense of direction can be screwed up if you don't use the map and since you can't use the map while in a vehicle, going the wrong way or making the wrong turn is pretty much inevitable unless you know your way around.
- The fact that you can harvest cars with an axe for scrap metal is not particularly intuitive, and you're unlikely to realize it without reading about it online. The only exception are those big RV campers which can't be harvested at all.
- Guns Do Not Work That Way: While the Mist does have a small selection of firearms available to the player and bandits as well as survivors, those weapons are either depicted incorrectly, or are incorrectly named. The reloads definitely take the cake for this trope though. A round DOES NOT need to be chambered on empty reloads. Doing this in real life can cause jams or outright break the gun.
- AK-47s ARE NOT chambered in 5.56x45 NATO. They're chambered in 7.62x39mm Russian, so how the gun even works in the game is strange.
- The Colt 1911 in the game is chambered in 9x19 Parabellum which is incorrect as Colt 1911s are chambered in .45 ACP.
- Misidentified Weapons: There is only ONE weapon that is Misidentified, and it's the poor M4A1 of all things! In the game, the M4A1 is incorrectly called an M4. M4s (the original M4 rifles) only fired in burst or semi-auto, not full auto, while M4A1's were (and still are) fully automatic.
- AK-47s were never chambered in 5.56x45 NATO. They were only chambered in 7.62x39mm Russian. An AK-101, AK-102, AK-108, or AK-19 would have been more appropriate since they are AK rifles that DO use 5.56x45 NATO.
- The 1911 in the game is NOT a true 1911 since it uses 9x19 Parabellum and not .45 ACP, which actual 1911s are chambered for, though there are modern 1911 clones that are chambered in 9x19 Parabellum. A Springfield 1911 DS Prodigy 9mm or Springfield 1911 Ronin Operator 9mm would have been more appropriate.
- Mysterious Mist: It's apparently responsible for creating the mutants, and it can appear suddenly during the day, causing the mutants to come out to hunt. The only ways to survive the mist are to be heavily armed with firearms and be armed to the teeth, have armed survivors, or go into your shelter and close the door until the mist is gone.
- Nice Day, Deadly Night: Day time is relatively peaceful, as long as you steer clear of bandit encampments and avoid any roaming bears. At night or when the mist rolls in, however, mutants begin to spawn across the map and can spot you from a considerable distance.
- Resources Management Gameplay: Naturally for a Survival Sandbox game. Notably, the map is relatively small and loot does not respawn, so once you've eventually used up all the existing canned food and soda, you're reliant on living off the land to survive. Hope you learned to farm, hunt, and purify water by that point.
- The current version allows the player to respawn resources using an option in the pause menu.
- Respawning Enemies: Bandits seem to respawn at their encampments after a few days. Mutants spawn in across the map at night or during mist events.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: The shotgun is the game's hardest hitting weapon, killing both bandits and mutants in one single close range blast and bears in just two shots. Since bandits and mutants are already pretty squishy, it's best to save your shotgun ammo for bears and the bosses.
- Survival Sandbox: It's a pretty typical Zombie Survival game. The main stand-out feature is that it's being developed with single-player in mind rather than as a PvPvE multiplayer experience.
- Technically-Living Zombie: They seem most comparable to the Darkseekers from I Am Legend.
- Weakened by the Light: The mutants appears to be burned by sunlight; their skin is cracked and charred and if they run into direct sunlight they start to actively burn. They shelter in abandoned indoor areas during the day, but come out to hunt at night or when the mist rolls in. Sometimes they can be encountered during the day in certain buildings.
- Wide-Open Sandbox: The game world is reasonably large, though considerably smaller than, say, Chernarus, being about the size of 2 or 3 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. maps joined together.
