In No More Room in Hell 2, other people are your best chance of survival
Facing down my first zombie in the first-person survival game No More Room in Hell 2 gave me a powerfully unsettling feeling. As I approached an abandoned ambulance with its headlights still cutting into the darkness, an undead woman standing nearby turned toward me. She began stumbling my way, moaning in what sounded like pain and distress. When I swung my lead pipe to knock her away from me, she screamed in what sounded vaguely like pain and bewilderment.
The zombie apocalypse is a well-worn setting for video games, which often try to outdo one another with gross, gory undead monsters bent on feasting on players' digital flesh. But the intent of No More Room in Hell 2, according to Game Director Leif Walter, is to take a more grounded, realistic, and frightening approach to surviving the rising of the dead. It draws inspiration from George Romero's genre-defining zombie films like Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead—a line from the latter inspired the game’s title—and attempts to capture what makes these versions of the undead so enduringly unnerving.
"It was really important for us to go back to the roots of the zombie genre as portrayed in the classic Romero films of the '70s and other cinema from that style. In those films, zombies always retain part of their humanity, which makes their fate ever more tragic," Walter said in an email interview. "As a player, having to dispose of someone...something still almost human captures a much more compelling horror fantasy than killing monsters or demons."
A grounded approach informs all aspects of No More Room in Hell 2, not only enhancing zombie encounters with the ever-present reminder that each creature was once human but also amping up the horror by making each one a credible threat to your survival. Each zombie takes either a precious bullet (or more, depending on your aim) or a significant amount of fight to dispatch. Getting in close with a pipe or a bat means making yourself extremely vulnerable to getting hurt, and in this game, that's a risk you can't always afford.
No More Room in Hell 2’s developers have described it as a sort of reverse battle royale game. You start on a large, open map with up to seven other players with few supplies. Exploring and scavenging better gear is essential to your survival, but even more important is finding the other players—not to fight but to join because you're much safer working together than you are apart. The goal is to work together to make it to the power station at the map's center, repair it, and get out alive.
"The social experience of true cooperative multiplayer was really important for us," Walter explained. "But starting an entire group of eight players together in one place, as in traditional multiplayer games (and in fact, as in the first No More Room in Hell) felt like the wrong setup to make players feel like they are truly living through an ongoing apocalyptic zombie outbreak. Starting alone, creating a beginning or opening akin to some great single-player horror games (the Resident Evil remakes, for example) and also like the greats of zombie cinema, felt like an awesome opportunity to inject a more suspenseful and vulnerable start to a match."
I recently played about two hours of No More Room in Hell 2 during a preview event ahead of its Early Access release, and more than anything, the game does a phenomenal job of building a palpable tension as you creep around in the dark trying to find your teammates. You can keep your light off and sneak to avoid zombies, but while that makes you harder to detect by the undead, it also can make it tougher for any potential allies to find you too. If you're loud and reckless, though, the undead will notice you and give chase. You have an advantage because they're usually slow, but some will run after you or alert more zombies to your presence. Sprinting past zombies might be safe in the short term, but you may turn around later and realize you've got a group tailing you when you're already in trouble.
Fighting zombies is pretty satisfying, though. The first No More Room in Hell was developed by Lever Games, and that team joined the studio Torn Banner in 2024. That combined the original team with developers who worked on Chivalry and Chivalry 2, a pair of intense multiplayer medieval combat games, to work on No More Room in Hell 2.
The sensibilities of Chivalry's heavy, impactful melee combat inform the battles with zombies in No More Room in Hell 2, as blunt objects meet skulls and blades cleave through limbs. Melee battles are savage and harrowing, and while the zombies can seem more tragically human than in other games, like in the Chivalry titles, there's plenty of gore here too.
"We were excited about the combat challenge in a co-op PvE title, as we knew that the melee mechanics in this game would be very different from the initiative-based PvP-focused system of Chivalry," Walter said. "But of course, we took some learnings from [Chivalry]—primarily the importance of the 'game feel' being very physical, visceral, and satisfying for players. Hit reactions play a big part in this, and making sure your swings provide great feedback to you as a player. This is where dismemberment comes in very naturally. It was great to extend this experiential target from our melee into the gunplay as well—a first for Torn Banner as a studio."
The game routes you toward your comrades by providing you with nearby objectives that help you get geared up for the final push to the power station, so everyone in your section of the map is given a common, if optional, goal. In one run, another player and I ran into each other near a bar that had been boobytrapped and barricaded by survivors before they were overrun. We worked together to complete several mini-objectives to dismantle the electrified traps and other defenses to get in, restore the bar's power, and uncover a stash of weapons.
As we discovered at the bar, working together is about more than just the strength of fighting zombies as a team. Objectives like this one require multiple steps, like disabling traps, finding a fresh fuse, and rewiring a junction box. Working on those little objectives can take up your attention and make you vulnerable, and having a pal means there's somebody to watch your back, barricade entrances to slow down zombies, or divide up the work so it can go much more quickly. You can also help teammates by sharing equipment to maximize your limited inventory space, offering healing items, and saving each other when one of you takes too much damage and is knocked down like in the Left 4 Dead games.
Having the help of teammates feels essential to survival, but it also adds another dimension to the dread No More Room in Hell 2 can produce too. After looting the bar, my new teammate and I made our way to another objective at a nearby train station. A derailment had left containers of noxious gas scattered around the tracks, and as we were finding our way around to the valves on each to seal them off and make the area safe, my teammate dropped out of the game.
Suddenly, I was alone again. Without an ally to watch my back, my entire approach to the game instantly changed. I was back to sneaking, staying hidden in the shadows, and hoping I could find some other players before it was too late.
In the end, I also died—but that's all part of the experience too. No More Room in Hell 2 is more akin to a roguelike than something like Left 4 Dead in this regard, and Walter said that, eventually, your character is going to give their life for the cause. The game includes permadeath: If your character dies before they’re extracted from the map at the end of the mission, they're gone for good, along with all their stuff. Keeping a character alive across multiple missions gives you a leg up, but you also earn account progress with every run to enhance the abilities of all your characters over time. Like in other roguelikes, it's the overall journey that counts more than the single character you're making it with.
And dying wasn't so bad, because the game includes one extremely satisfying feature. Like in Romero's zombie movies, if someone dies to the hordes of undead, their body arises to join them. It adds one more tragic dimension to the undead of No More Room in Hell 2, and one more important reason to work together: If you don't, the zombie that finally kills you could be a former friend.
No More Room in Hell 2 launches in Early Access on the Epic Games Store on October 22.