If you’re a fan of retro-style gaming you’ll hopefully already be aware of the pretty robust classic arcade revival on the part of the indie development community. Not only have we seen many classics from those eras on the Switch, we’ve also seen a great number of new titles mostly developed in a way that often looks and feels authentic to gaming from that era. The problem for developers is that because of that the bar for expectation has continued to rise, putting pressure on developers to do things right in order to get noticed.

As you may have guessed by the game’s name, one of the positives for Living Dead house is an abundance of zombies that will be shambling around, which you’ll have the opportunity to dispatch in a pleasing variety of ways. There’s something to be said for the simplicity of an axe to the torso, but with the availability of bear traps and even a flamethrower, the game tries to make things fun. Your goal, unsurprisingly, will be to simply survive, evading and taking out zombies as you’re able, hopefully holding out until the sun rises, which for whatever reason makes them all disappear. Aside from trying to keep yourself out of trouble, and making use of one of your weapons when things get hairy, you’ll also be able to pick up some boards and a hammer to at least close up one of their means of entry, but beyond that there isn’t generally a lot of strategy at play. I’d also note that there’s a survival mode, and an option to play co-op, but since the core gameplay ultimately doesn’t really change they’re merely more variations on a theme.

While this is all fun enough to a degree, given the competition out there it’s hard not to note some shortcomings. The first may be a basic one, but it’s still important, and that’s the fact that the player is just pulled into playing cold without any form of instruction on the controls, objectives, or concepts. Even old-school arcade titles would include such information either on their side bezel, the control panel, the attract screen, or even before getting started. Many peers also have included a How to Play option in their title screen, and even if those instructions are minimal it’s a key feature which is sadly missed. Granted, it’s easy enough to catch on, but it still feels like a sloppy oversight. The more critical issue though is that outside of varying floor layouts for the most part the action remains mostly the same. Some stages at least have environmental traps that add to the fun, but at some point there just isn’t much variety here. This isn’t necessarily a bad arcade outing, and its low price at least feels appropriate, but it just doesn’t have quite the same spark of fun or depth of its peers.