Outbreak 1998

The city will not be held, cleared or treated. It will be sealed — and eighteen people are still transmitting from inside it.

OUTBREAK 1998 is top-down survival horror built as a real Game Boy Color cartridge. You are emergency services: a jacket, a respirator, a service pistol and eight rounds, sweeping six districts for the keycard that opens the way out and for whoever is still alive in there.

You cannot shoot your way out

A shambler takes two rounds. A runner takes one. A tank takes four, which is half of everything you own. A district holds seven to eleven of them and gives you eight rounds and maybe more from a box.

The numbers do not add up on purpose. Running past is a strategy — usually it is the strategy — and the pistol is for opening a door you have to go through, not for clearing a room.

Three kinds, and you can see which

Six sprite palettes do the threat readout at a glance:

• GREEN, the shambler. Drifts until something with a heartbeat comes within about ten tiles, then comes straight at you and slides along walls rather than sticking on them.
• YELLOW, the runner. Fast enough that walking away will not work. Dies to one shot.
• PURPLE, the tank. No aggro range at all — it knows where you are from anywhere on the map, from the moment the district loads, and it is already walking. First appears in the mall. The sewers have two.

Six districts

• THE SUBURBS — streets, houses and abandoned cars under purple dark. Seven infected, open ground, room to go round them.
• THE MALL — shelf mazes under lights that never went off, and a locked security office. Eight infected and the first tank.
• THE SEWERS — tight corridors and flooded basins in green. Nine infected, two tanks, and nowhere wide enough to walk round either of them.
• THE HOSPITAL — wards off three long corridors, in mint. Three medkits and one ammo box: the one district built to be outrun rather than fought.
• THE PARKING DECK — open decks on a pillar grid, in concrete grey. Eleven infected and two tanks, and nothing anywhere to break line of sight.
• THE LABORATORY — containment rings around a sealed core, in cold blue. The keycard sits in the middle, so you leave the way you came.
  More infected is not what makes a district hard. In open ground a shambler is an obstacle you steer around; in a corridor one tile wide it is a wall that walks.

Eighteen people

Three per district. They do not move, they do not follow you and they do not need escorting — touch one and they are counted.

Rescues open no doors, restore no hearts and give you no ammunition. The exit works without them. The only thing they change is the number kept in the cartridge's battery, which remembers the most you have ever brought out. Finishing is not hard. Finishing with all eighteen means going into every room you would rather skip, on the ammunition you did not spend, in the Parking Deck, with two tanks already walking toward you and nothing to hide behind.

The sound is a proximity sensor

There is no melody while you play. Sound channel three holds a low drone and channel two drops single notes into it, and both get denser, faster and louder as the nearest infected closes on you — until, up close, the pattern is a doubled heartbeat.

Nothing on screen tells you this. The score does, through a wall, before you have line of sight. Survival horror lives on silence, and a loop playing over the top of it would throw that away.

The effects sit on channels one and four and the score on two and three, so they never fight for the hardware and nothing has to duck out of the way of anything else. The title screen and the ending get an actual theme, where there is nothing left to listen for.

Controls

D-Pad Move:  eight directions
B (hold):   Run
A:   Fire
Start:  Confirm

In the download

• outbreak_1998.gbc — 32 KB Game Boy Color ROM with battery save
• Outbreak_1998_Manual.pdf — 17-page digital instruction booklet, in the style of the ones that came in the box: the city and what happened to it, how to read the screen, a page on each of the three kinds of infected, the survivor and supply rules, a briefing on all six districts, the sweeper's field notes, and a technical dossier on how the cartridge does what it does
• Outbreak 1998 collectible card 04 of 9 — Eris Games Game Boy Collection, Series One
• Pay at least $2: Outbreak 1998 collectible card (FOIL VERSION)

Credits

Created by Eris Games