The Zombie Apocalypse has destroyed human society. All people can do now is try to make it to the next day without getting eaten or infected. In a small town near the Canadian border, a voice comes on your radio asking you for help. Now you need to reach him.
The game was released on December 7th, 2019 on Itch.io.
The Blackpine Outbreak contains examples of:
- Abandoned Laboratory: There's one located underneath the farm you need to explore. You can get there from an elevator in a barn hidden in the corn maze, and you need to go there to get the Alsulin medication.
- Always Night: Or rather, always early morning. The sky is blue in the game, and the landscape is always shown to be dark.
- Bloody Handprint: You find one on the elevator door in the above-mentioned Abandoned Laboratory. Another can be found near the body of the dead survivor at the motel.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Crouch is mapped to the "F" key (which no one else ever does), which can be confusing. Fortunately, all other controls are standard WASD FPS controls.
- Diegetic Interface: There's no HUD, so you need to keep track of how many bullets are left in your revolver and how many you're still carrying by yourself. Also, there's no crosshair, and your character apparently doesn't know how to use the iron sights on their revolver, so you're just going to have to guesstimate when trying to shoot a zombie in the head.
- Driven to Suicide: A gunshot can be heard as you're riding the elevator to the Voice's safehouse, and when you reach him you find him dead with a revolver laying by his body, suggesting he shot himself rather than succumb to the infection.
- Elite Zombie: It takes several headshots to put down a cop, construction worker, or hazmat zombie. The construction worker is wearing a hard hat, while the hazmat is wearing a gas mask, while the unhelmeted cop is apparently just that tough. It's generally best to simply avoid them.
- Extremely Short Timespan: The whole game happens over the course of one night. Though this makes sense as the game itself shouldn't take more than about 30-40 minutes from start to finish.
- First-Person Ghost: Averted; if you look down you can see your character's entire body. Apparently they're wearing jeans, blue clothes, some sort of tactical vest, and based on their shadow they may also be wearing a gas mask.
- Incurable Cough of Death: The man on the other side of the radio can be heard coughing, a result of his infection. By the time you reach him, he's dead.
- Late to the Party: The game consists of your character making their way through several of their neighboring barricaded survivor settlements to reach the voice on the radio. You find that all of these settlements have fallen to the zombies already.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: If the zombies get close enough to you, you'll see they have red eyes.
- Revolvers Are Just Better: The only weapon you get is a revolver. One shot to the head can down a zombie.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: The man who contacted you on the radio and his friend are both dead by the time you find them, and the game ends immediately once you find the dead body of the former. On the plus side, you now have access to their safehouse and supplies, which seem to be more secure than the one you started out in.
- Survival Horror: Revolver ammo is limited and because of the game's deliberately difficult aiming system it is very easy to waste bullets with missed shots in combat. Often evading enemies is a better idea than directly fighting them. That said, if you have good aim (or your monitor has a gamer crosshair feature) and explore around carefully, there's enough revolver ammo laying around to kill more or less every zombie in the neighborhood.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: If you kill all the zombies at the motel before picking up the Alsulin medication (which is more likely than it sounds as the lab is hidden in a corn maze and easy to miss, making it so it's rather easy to accidentally skip it and go straight to the motel instead), you'll break the game's scripting and put it into an unwinnable state.
- Voice with an Internet Connection: The guy on the radio.
- Zombie Apocalypse: Naturally, this trope is in effect, since all the enemies are zombies.
