For those of us not rich enough to inherit a billion dollar corporation from our parents by way of nepotism, the dream of becoming a corrupt CEO that flaunts federal regulation before finally being caught and sentenced to a decade in a low security prison is sadly out of reach. Thanks to the kind folks at Team17, however, you can now at least live out that dream virtually with Undead Inc. Undead Inc. is about conducting questionable medical experiments on live patients to maximize profit while maintaining deniability; so, basically, the ideal game for anyone who felt like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study would’ve been perfect if it just had more zombies.

Historical jokes aside, Undead Inc. is a side-scrolling business management simulation where you control a subsidiary of a pharmaceutical conglomerate. Broadly speaking, your job is to make enough money to please your superiors. The catch is that it takes place in some bizarre alternate reality, where life-saving drugs have to be sold at reasonable prices, so relying solely on selling legal medication will only keep you afloat for so long. The solution, of course, is crime. There’s a whole host of more profitable, illicit research and products that can be sold on the black market, but doing so will attract the attention of the police sooner or later. The crux of gameplay, then, lies in trying to toe that line as best you can for as long as you can; being profitable enough to stay above water, while fending off the fuzz for as long as possible.

Booting up Undead Inc. gives you two ways to play right off the bat: you can either jump into the first of a series of pre-prepared scenarios, or move into an endless mode of sorts, where you see how long you can keep your company going. The game recommends you play through all the scenarios before progressing to endless mode, and that’s predominantly because those scenarios are really just fancier tutorials that convey the general basics you'll need to play the endless mode effectively. There are some light story elements baked into them, and a few moments where you do have a bit of free choice, but for the most part the scenarios are all just heavily rail-roaded segments designed to teach you how to play the game effectively.

This is probably the first major misstep for Undead Inc. (as well as a lot of strategy/management titles that I’ve encountered in recent memory). Tutorials are something of a necessary evil in most games; it’s important to teach the player how to succeed, but they’re rarely an enjoyable part of the game itself. The best tutorials are often the ones where you don’t even feel like you’re being taught anything at all; they’re just clever usage of level design that force the player to try and learn new things. Well-crafted titles also usually space their tutorials out, giving players a chance to play it more independently for a bit before bringing them back for more instruction-giving. 

Undead Inc. fails both of these litmus tests rather egregiously. If you decide to play all the scenarios as recommended before jumping into endless mode, you’re looking at upwards of an hour and a half or so of tutorializing. Very little of this feels like organic or engaging teaching too; the game’s method of instructing is to tell you what each mechanic does, walk you through the most basic example of how to do it, and then move onto the next thing. This method of tutorializing brings two big problems with it. The first, and probably most obvious, is that it gets very boring, very quickly. I’ll allow some room for error here for people who have a greater tolerance for tutorializing than me, but generally speaking, the early part of a game should be the hook that catches the player’s attention, not a glorified user manual you have to slog through in order to actually have fun with the game.

The other problem, though, is it’s just not a particularly effective way of imparting knowledge. There’s a reason why calculus classes don’t try to cover everything from continuity to factorials in the span of one week, and it’s because humans can only absorb so much information at a time. This is particularly true when it comes to learning how to do something; people generally need to practice a technique at least a handful of times for it to become ingrained in their memory. Having a player perform something once, then hurriedly dashing off to the next topic before that’s had a realistic chance to become part of the player’s long term memory, is defeating the very purpose of all this tutorializing in the first place. What’s the point of spending all this time preparing players for endless mode if they won’t absorb that information anyway?

Speaking of endless mode, it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like; you try to keep your operation going for as long as possible in a single run. There’s a bit of a Lethal Company vibe here, as survival is dependent on paying a routine franchising fee every so often. It starts off pretty manageable, but the fee increases significantly every time you pay it, so it isn’t long before you have to start diving into more legally dubious activities in order to keep up with your impending deadlines. Of course, this means increasing the chance of getting caught by the police, which presents that aforementioned tightrope element mentioned previously.

Endless mode is where the game shines its brightest; there’s a lot of room for creative, on-the-fly problem-solving as you try to manage your finances and figure out which buildings you need and where to place them optimally. One of the more interesting strategy elements unique to Undead Inc. is the need for hired employees to sleep and go on coffee breaks, which makes placing your public workplaces close to coffee shops and housing units important. The human element gets even more interesting when the black market gets brought into play, as some people are more morally flexible than others. Police can be bribed, some employees may snitch, and gangs might try and raid your base. Undead Inc. does a good job, in general, of capturing the unpredictability of the human element and turning this into interesting gameplay ideas.

Having said that, there are a lot of annoyances in the moment-to-moment design that made me not really feel like picking the game back up once I felt I had played enough to review it. The aforementioned coffee and sleep breaks happen far, far too often, to the point where employees are booking it for the local Starbucks every couple of real world minutes. Rooms can and will break (however that works) within a few in-game weeks of use, at which point you need to shut that area of operation down to fix things. Despite the map extending very far horizontally, your ability to scroll across the entire map is painfully slow, and when you combine this with everyone being addicted to coffee like it's crack cocaine, you have a recipe for a game where getting an employee from one side of the map to the other is an excruciatingly painful process at points. 

In fairness, none of these complaints are inherent problems with the game’s balance or strategy; in fact, one could even make an argument that these elements are a big part of Undead Inc.’s strategy as it stands. But I would argue that one of, if not the, key tenets for just about any video game is that it be fun to play, and even when it’s operating at its best, Undead Inc. never became  fun to play for me, at least not for very long. The sheer amount of tutorializing on display, constantly having to account for employees leaving, facilities frequently breaking, and so on, make it a game that requires a lot of busywork to keep running, and I don’t think that works in its favor.

One final thing that I know doesn’t work in its favor is the sheer number of technical issues. Characters will sometimes run off screen and disappear altogether, leaving you with a person sprinting into the void forever. Police officers will sometimes just decide to permanently stay in your buildings during a raid, effectively arresting employees infinitely until you’re out of staff members, and there's no way to make them go away. Occasionally, the police didn’t even bother to wait for my staff to commit any crimes, and decided to just gun them down while they were walking back home like we were in Minority Report. The game will also sometimes just flat out crash altogether, which frankly might be the least annoying of these given how hawkish the autosave is.

Despite the harsh words, I think Undead Inc. has a lot of potential. The idea of running my own little Umbrella Corporation while dodging cops and either paying off or silencing employees is really cool. But the execution just falls flat most of the time. It takes far, far too much time to get into, and even when you do the experience is such that it feels like you have to fight to enjoy it most of the time, between the technical problems and the way certain elements of the game are designed. With some work, I think there could be something enjoyable here, but as it stands at launch it’s very difficult to recommend.