H1Z1 is a stingy game that only grudgingly awards effort, because its chief concession toward realism is that building anything in a world stripped-bare by disaster is incredibly difficult. What's difficult is making progress beyond bare survival. There's no shortage of food in the world, especially around towns and in deserted highway gas stations. It's quite easy, in fact, to just keep on going. Yet survival itself isn't that hard in H1Z1.

Avoiding a wild animal or a zombie because it's just not worth the two or three shots it would take to kill, when I've only got an empty rifle and a pistol with half a magazine. H1Z1 constantly made me feel the heaviness of survival: being unable to carry good loot because I'm already overburdened, and being forced to dump precious foot and weapons on the ground to make room for scrap materials for a shelter. Which is perhaps a fine feeling for a zombie-apocalypse game to evoke, but it's not a particularly exciting one. I was certainly surviving… but it didn't feel like living. Then I'd have to stand by a bed for 20 seconds and rest, and perhaps eat some food in order to recharge my energy and hydration bars. An entire hour could pass with little to show for it except a handful of pistol ammunition and a few wooden planks for construction. As I crept around the small town of Pleasant Valley, looting one cookie-cutter office building and tract home after another while avoiding the surprisingly sparse population of zombies, I started to wonder why I should be so invested in acquiring old cans of food and bottles of fresh water. I found myself thinking about meaning a lot during my time with H1Z1, which is a game that certainly gives plenty of space for introspection. Because its name proves to be a pretty accurate summary of what's on offer in this Early Access build, and a reminder that sometimes survival isn't enough. In H1Z1: Just Survive, I think I've found the cure for apocalyptic romanticism. If only, such fiction says, something awful would come along and imbue our lives with meaning as we fight to preserve them. Several times during its run, Battlestar Galactica paused to show you just how lost and hopeless the main characters were before their world was destroyed. A similar sentiment ran through a couple early issues of The Walking Dead. World War Z has no shortage of characters who found meaning and purpose in the zombie apocalypse, a disaster that liberated them from postmodern malaise. There's an archetypical plot running through a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, and particularly zombie fiction, where the survivors realize that they never before felt as alive as they do in the midst of their fight for survival.

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