Death Road to Canada

• Title — Death Road to Canada • Developer — Rocketcat Games, Madgarden • Released — Windows, OS X, Linux July 21, 2016 iOS March 22, 2017 Android October 26, 2017 Switch, PS4, Xbox One May 8, 2018 • Publisher — Rocketcat Games • Platforms — Microsoft Windows OS X Linux iOS Android Nintendo Switch PlayStation 4 Xbox One • Modes — Single-player, multiplayer • Genre — Action-adventure, roguelike

A zombie apocalypse has killed billions and shattered world civilization. However, the zombies are incapable of functioning in sufficiently cold weather. A group of survivors, each with different skills, attempts to drive from Florida to Canada in hopes of finding safety. Gameplay consists of two parts: exploration, in which the group moves through buildings searching for supplies and fighting zombies; and text-based events, where the player must choose a response to problems and receive bonuses or penalties. A character's morale must also be managed; it can be raised or lowered through events and through running out of supplies. A character that runs out of morale will cause problems for the group. Occasionally the group will encounter "sieges," where they must survive a growing zombie horde for a set amount of time. Surviving a siege earns "Zombo Points," which can be spent on permanent upgrades for future journeys. The journey north lasts 9 to 999 in-game days depending on the difficulty level. At the end, the survivors must reach the Canadian border while pursued by a massive horde of zombies. There they are met by Mounties and a Justin Trudeau-lookalike, who easily defeat the zombies, congratulate the group and grant them Canadian citizenship.

The studio's previous game, Wayward Souls, released in 2014, and following that, development on Death Road to Canada began. Kepa Auwae of Rocketcat Games, one of the game's developers, said, "The story is a humorous take on how America sees Canada, as thought up by someone that lives in Kitchener." The story was also influenced by the goofiness of the zombie genre, and the possibilities of randomly generated storytelling. It was the studio's first game to launch first on PC, in order to not have to balance making the game profitable for mobile, and making sure it was fun for players, wanting to avoid making it free-to-play. The developer commented "How free-to-play games work is that you're counting on people to get annoyed, and then having to pay to reduce their annoyance". Zombies were intended to be slow, but could do enough damage so that large hordes of them could overwhelm the player. The text interludes were added to provide an opportunity for each of the characters' personalities to come out. Rocketcat took inspiration from what Auwae called "the unintentionally funny parts of the Walking Dead," and George Romero. Over the course of development, text events and the action gameplay had equal priority at one point, but over time it shifted to focusing more on the action gameplay. Since its initial release in 2016, the game has continued to be updated and supported by the developers. The gameplay logic is in a scripting language based on the Forth (programming language), called DEATHFORTH. This has allowed the community to mod the game in various ways.