Closing Shift

While the zombie apocalypse has been depicted through countless lenses in gaming, few titles have literally trapped players inside the nail-biting confines of a seemingly innocuous grocery store setting. Closing Shift from Carrot Studios shirks grand narratives and open-world excess for a focused, resource-managing survival experience set within the uncommonly cozy-turned-creepy locale of a humble supermarket.

As the title implies, you'll assume the role of a hapless retail worker stuck clocking out during the overnight "closing shift" as the dead begin rising. Armed with little more than shelving carts and outdated canned goods, Closing Shift challenges you to overcome the undead onslaught through scrappy combat, keen scavenging, and more than a bit of ingenuity.

A Delightfully Mundane Setting for the Apocalypse

From the outset, Closing Shift's eerily realized grocery store setting establishes an atmosphere of impending dread. The meticulously constructed aisles, checkout lanes, and backrooms contain all the familiar signage and product placement of real retail outlets. It's an incredibly banal environment that belies the escalating chaos about to unfold.

This dedication to making the store feel like a living, breathing supermarket makes the eventual zombie takeover all the more disconcerting. Few games manage to turn such a tediously pedestrian setting into an authentic horror locale quite like Closing Shift.

Get Resourceful or Get Devoured

Once the undead invasion hits full tilt, Closing Shift morphs into an unrelenting test of resource management and careful risk/reward assessment. As supplies start depleting, every decision to venture out and scavenge new aisles risks potential supply caches against the near-certainty of encountering more zombies.

Players will have to stretch their limited supplies of defensive tools, from basic blunt weapons like baseball bats to improvised environmental items like shelving units, hand baskets and even stockpiles of projectile canned goods. Making the most of each find while mitigating damage becomes a delicate, ever-escalating dance.

In that sense, Closing Shift shares some gameplay DNA with harsh survival sims like This War of Mine that force you to make pragmatic, morally-grey choices for the sake of self-preservation. It can be both exhilarating and crushing when a well-laid scavenging run ends in a brutal realization that you've depleted too many resources.

Just when the core loop starts growing too repetitive, Closing Shift will shake things up by spawning more powerful zombies, removing crucial barricades, or temporarily cutting off supply lines. This consistent remixing of obstacles and evolving objectives helps the moment-to-moment gameplay remain gripping despite the confined setting.

Review: 7/10

With its clever subversion of the mundane grocery store setting and unrelenting focus on strategic resource management and survival tactics, Closing Shift stands out as a tense, distinctive take on the well-trodden zombie genre.

Pros:

• Eerily atmospheric rendering of grocery store setting
• Tense, strategic resource and supply management gameplay
• High replay value through evolving objectives and zombie varieties
• Captures desperation of scrambling to survive against the horde
• Unique take on the zombie survival premise

Cons:

• Relatively linear progression limits longevity
• Lack of narrative context beyond basic premise
• Fairly barebones visual and gameplay feature set
• Slower pacing may test some players' patience

Closing Shift - an action movie with survival elements will teach you how to close shifts in convenience stores correctly. After a hard day's work, you have new customers. Stinky, out of their minds and, unlike the vagrants who fit that description, dead. Well, all kinds of movies and TV series prepared you for this situation, but nobody expected it to happen like this. Now you'll have to survive inside the store, fight back the advancing zombies and try to contact the rest of the world.

Pros of the game:

• Look for weapons inside the store
• Survival strategy is completely up to you