PAX West 2025: God Save Birmingham – an Ambitious Take On the Zombie Genre

At this point, you can throw a stone in any direction and hit a zombie game. Throughout the 2000s, the gaming world was inundated with zombie shooters, story-driven zombie epics, and zombie survival games, creating what some have coined "zombie fatigue." Due to this, it's difficult to make a game in the zombie genre today that truly stands out and piques the curiosity of those who have already spent decades virtually lopping the heads off of the undead. Imagine my surprise, then, upon receiving an email from Ocean Drive Studio about their upcoming zombie game God Save Birmingham, and just the cover art alone grabbed my attention.

Depicted in that email was an exhausted, bloody man, in the garb of a medieval peasant, leaning against a stone wall with the handle of a pitchfork resting against him. If this were a zombie game, it was unlike any I'd ever seen.

Indeed, God Save Birmingham is a zombie survival game set in 1300s Birmingham, England. You play as the sole survivor of a zombie outbreak, a simple farmer who has found himself in a horrible situation, as his neighbors and friends become shambling hordes of the dead walking. You must use your wits and survival skills to outlast the horde for as long as possible, scavenging for food and water, and keeping safe.

What immediately sets God Save Birmingham apart is its setting. Despite the chance for emergent gameplay due to the visceral and close-quarters combat of medieval Europe, very few zombie games take advantage of this underutilized time period. In the demo I played, it quickly became apparent how well the developer had captured the essence of a medieval town. Birmingham is painstakingly recreated, from the town's layout to the tools and food usable by the player. As a bit of a history buff, I was blown away by how real it all felt.

I was given a hatchet and a simple pitchfork and sent on my merry way to carve out a bit of safety within the huts and houses scattered throughout the area. As I exited the starting house, I was quickly overwhelmed by just how many zombies were surrounding the village. Talking to one of the developers, they said they were bouncing around the idea of populating the streets with roughly the same number of zombies as would have been the population of the time, as the zombies don't respawn after you kill them. Their efforts show up; they are everywhere.

Every item in the world is interactable, be it a cup on a table or the table itself. The devs wanted to ensure that you could play God Save Birmingham your way. Want to barricade a broken-down door? Drag some tables over and stack them in front of it. Need to get over a ledge or onto a roof? Pick up a barrel, set it down in front of the ledge, and climb on up. You can even set traps for the zombies, as they, too, have extensive physics and will trip and stumble over items. I was being chased by a horde, and decided to pick up a wagon wheel and throw it at the feet of the encroaching corpses. It landed at their feet, and I watched as one by one they stumbled, tripped, and fell to the mud, giving me plenty of time to escape. The physics engine on display would be impressive in a full-fledged game, let alone in a pre-alpha like I played at PAX West.

This is a survival game, after all, so you have a multitude of stats reflecting the state of your character, including fear, hunger, thirst, endurance, and overall health. Being Ye Olde England, however, gathering these resources is a lot more difficult than it sounds. My thirst was starting to degrade, so I decided to leave my shelter and find a well. The well was surrounded by zombies, so I worked to slowly clear the area around it, strategically kiting the horrors into narrow passageways so I could take their legs off with the axe and curb stomp their rotting heads to bits.

Eventually, I was able to clear the area and get my water. I drank my fill, only to turn around and find a small group of zombies shambling my way. I pulled out my pitchfork and ran. In my desperate scramble over a fence that stood between me and the road, I stumbled and dropped my pitchfork, which was subsequently trampled by the horde. With no way to retrieve it, I was down to my close-quarters hatchet. I quickly scanned the horizon, frantically trying to find safety. I went where I thought any medieval peasant would in a situation like this: the massive church in the center of town.

Dodging shambling undead and taking out the occasional zombie with my axe, I made my way to the church. Upon entering the courtyard, I found the entire abbey had been infected, with decaying monks swaying to and fro under the church's gorgeous architecture. Undeterred, I went into the holy ground. The place of worship was dark, with sputtering torches throwing desperate streaks of light throughout the hall, which was filled to the brim with abominations that were once men of the cloth. This is where I met my fate, as the rest of the clergy quickly surrounded my poor farmer and slowly tore him to pieces. I watched helplessly as the zombies vied for a mouthful of my man's flesh before the screen faded to black, and I found myself back in the starting house.

The funny thing is that the developer next to me apologized for the loss of my pitchfork and being overtaken at the church. These sorts of emergent stories are what make sandbox survival games so amazing – each action I took had a consequence, and that consequence was ultimately my own demise. I was unbelievably impressed with God Save Birmingham, as this pre-alpha demo had more polish, interwoven systems, and horrifying fun to be had than most zombie games that go to release. Project Zomboid was obviously a huge inspiration for this title, and that inspiration is felt fully. All this isn't even to mention that the game looks gorgeous, impressively rendered in Unreal 5 with beautiful lighting effects and gory detail in the horrifying visages of the undead making their way through town.

If you have any interest whatsoever in zombie survival games, I highly recommend you look up God Save Birmingham. You can follow the game's development on X here, as well as wishlist it on Steam. There's also an option to sign up for the pre-alpha, but be forewarned: Ocean Drive Studio will ask for the specs of your PC to help them better optimize the experience. I, for one, am extremely excited to see where this game goes, and it warmed my heart to see the constant line surrounding the booth at PAX West.

There's way more coverage on the way from PAX West 2025! Right now, you can read about everything we saw at the DreadXP booth, and check back regularly this week for even more hands-on news and previews!