All of Us Are Dead... Review

I was in school around the time that zombie media began to blow up. Left 4 Dead was the co-op game to play with friends. The Last of Us was leaving a lasting impact on my classmates, and everyone in school would talk about the most recent episode of The Walking Dead. The multiplayer survival genre was making waves across the internet thanks to the rise of games like DayZ. We all had our plans for what we would do if a zombie apocalypse happened. It’s a medium that hasn’t seen much love recently, so when I came across All Of Us Are Dead… and was offered the chance to relive my teenage dreams of dealing with a zombie apocalypse in school, I was eager to revisit a part of my childhood that I haven’t given much thought to for a long time.

All of Us Are Dead… is a Korean visual novel set within the fictional school of Hyosan High and is most widely known for the Netflix series adaptation released in 2022. In reality, All of Us Are Dead… started as a webtoon in 2009, and the visual novel brought to us by IKINAGAMES offers a faithful retelling of the original story from 15 years ago, complete with various endings and new insights into elements of the story that have been previously untouched in other adaptations. 

The story starts as a normal summer morning for Nam On-jo, our primary protagonist throughout the story. When a fellow classmate bursts into class after being missing for two days, claiming to have been held hostage by the school’s science teacher, things rapidly begin to spiral into chaos as a zombie virus starts to tear its way throughout the school. Despite its setting of being in a school and most characters being 15—18 years old, AoUAD doesn’t hold back with the brutality of the zombie virus and makes it clear very quickly just how dangerous things are, both because of the roaming dead and the abhorrent acts of the living.

AoUAD follows the story of a group of survivors within Hyosan High after the school becomes ground zero for the zombie virus. Most of the characters are all members of the same 11th-grade class, and we follow their journey through the thoughts and perspective of the aforementioned Nam On-jo, a girl who ‘lacks presence’ but can pretty much make friends with anyone. Also, occasionally taking the focus is Lee Su-hyeok, an athletic and friendly boy whose fierce loyalty to his friends lands him in danger frequently, and Jang Ha-ri, a survivor from a different group who’s a competitive archer and friend of Su-hyeok. Whilst every character is given a lot of love, these three, in particular, get a lot of focus to the point where Ha-ri herself could easily be the main character in her own story. The perspective hops around as and when appropriate and never spends too much time in one place, but the focus of the story is typically shown through one of these three characters, and the choices we make will determine how they react to the situation around them. 

AoUAD advertises itself as an interactive visual novel where the choices you make take you onto different paths. In reality, almost every choice you make in the game is superficial up until the final chapter. Any choice presented to you boils down to either ‘the situation gets resolved the same way no matter what you pick’ or ‘if you make the wrong decision, you die instantly and have to reload’. While this isn’t enough to completely kill the suspense, it takes some of the thrills & dreads out of decision-making when you know it doesn’t make any difference. The only exception to this is in the final chapter, where your decisions will dictate which ending you receive. Decisions you make in the early game have no bearing (even when they really should), as any branches that do occur either result in inevitable death or join back together to a singular thread within a scene or two. 

If you’re a bit of a completionist, that may be a good thing, however. It’s not a tedious task to see every route, and the game makes replaying previous chapters incredibly easy with the storyboard feature, which allows you to jump to any scene within a chapter and play from there. Each character has their own character bio page, complete with small details about them that get filled in the more you learn about them. These are all colour-coded to differentiate between students and faculty, as well as which grade the character is in. This not only makes it easy to check up details on characters but also makes digging through all the branches feel fulfilling as you learn more about the characters. The storyboard function, combined with how little the branches affect the overall story, makes this as easy to do as it is rewarding.

Throughout the 10 chapters of the game, we gain insight into every facet of the children’s survival. The webtoon & TV show offer glimpses into how the rest of the nation is responding to the crisis in Hyosan, but the game keeps players completely out of the loop by focusing solely on the survivors within Hyosan High. This focus, combined with the length of the game, means that there’s never a character that feels forgettable. Even the ones who get killed off early will be mentioned by the others or will have anecdotal stories attributed to them. AoUAD does a lot of work to make each character feel important, if not to the grander narrative, then to each other. It spends a lot of time reminding the player that these are still just teenagers, most of whom have been friends for years. The amount of time spent with the characters allows for a lot of cathartic moments without interfering with the pacing or ignoring the wider threat that is present around them. On the whole, AoUAD expertly mixes the doom and gloom of the situation with sprinkles of much-needed optimism, making sure the player doesn’t get inundated with despair and offering glimmers of hope for both the player and the characters.

The characters, as expected for a visual novel, are a huge driving force for AoUAD, and each one is brilliantly done. With such a wide cast and multiple groups of characters to follow simultaneously, it would be easy to get overwhelmed or lost within the story, but this never becomes an issue. Each character and plot thread sits comfortably within the narrative, and you get to spend enough time with them to really understand them. The aforementioned character bio page makes meeting new characters a fun experience and makes refreshing your memory on these characters easy to do. Whether you love them or despise them, each character makes a lasting impression, and AoUAD makes sure that both the player and the characters involved do not forget anyone lightly. Choi Nam-ra and Park Mi-jin were particular standouts for me, especially as they both started in rather unassuming positions and ended up growing into my favourite characters from the game.

The investment you can gain for these characters is aided greatly by their voice acting. AoUAD is a fully voice-acted visual novel, with the only unvoiced sections being the internal thoughts of whoever we’re following within a scene (typically On-jo). This is all in Korean and has subtitle translations for English, Spanish, and Japanese. The combination of character writing and voice acting for the characters does an excellent job of making you feel for the characters whilst still giving them more soft-hearted moments to remind you that these people are still friends after everything that happens, and the majority of them are still teenagers. AoUAD does a good job of giving both the characters and the narrative itself room to breathe by letting the survivors within Hyosan High just be themselves from time to time. They’ll talk about football, make jokes about how a girl spoke to them, or be vulnerable and naive in a way only a high-schooler can be. Despite its fantastical premise, AoUAD does a surprisingly sound job of making its characters feel real as they navigate the awkwardness of youth with the terrors of a zombie virus that tears through the school. Everything comes together to bring these characters to life, in turn making the reader all the more invested in their survival. 

The game's art style is a major help in bringing these characters to life. Almost every character gets at least one major sprite change over the events of the game, and even before this, their sprites will reflect what has happened to them so far. Any cuts, bruises, or bloodstains will stay on their clothes and bodies, and it really does wonders for making the characters feel like real people who are being impacted by the world around them. The background art is often not heavily detailed, but it’s not uncommon for a location to offer several angles of the room, which is a simple thing but fantastic when it comes to gaining a sense of physical scale. A large portion of the game takes place in the school's broadcasting room, which itself has four different backgrounds to represent it, alongside the various computer graphics renders that take place within. The level of care and attention that goes into both the characters and the environment makes it easy to connect yourself with Hyosan High School and its inhabitants. There is the occasional instance of repeated backgrounds for classrooms and reusing sprites for common zombies, but this isn’t exactly deal-breaking, and there’s more than enough love put into other aspects of the game’s design to not have this be an issue. 

On the topic of art, the CGs found within the game are all gorgeous. AoUAD offers a generous helping of CGs throughout its story to help set a scene and is another testament to the love that IKINAGAMES have for the tale they are telling. The music of AoUAD is, again, another sign of such. AoUAD does not sport an extensive OST, but the select few tracks present are all pretty much perfect for what they are used for. The game starts with a simple, sickly sweet upbeat track as you accompany On-jo making her way through what should be a normal day at school, which quickly gets replaced by a much more sinister theme as hell begins to break loose. The music in AoUAD was fairly simple, but it did more than enough to set each scene without needing to be too extravagant.

AoUAD winds up being a rather long game, with the 10 chapters each offering an impressive length and clocking in around 30 hours before I was finished. This length surprised me but was far from disappointing, as even when I was finished the game, I ended up wanting more, so much so that I 100%’d the game and then went on to watch the Netflix series. The visual novel for AoUAD did not seem to be widely advertised, or if it was it did not get the kind of reach it deserved. Fans of the TV show and webtoon will most likely love what’s on offer here, as AoUAD offers a closer look at the survivors within Hyosan High than ever seen before. If you’re a fan of the zombie genre with no knowledge of the story (much like myself), this is still an absolute recommendation. All of Us Are Dead takes a story from over 15 years ago and adapts it to the modern day whilst still managing to make itself stand out among the myriad of zombie survival stories. With its only let-downs being the occasional translation mishap, the classic ‘Telltale syndrome’ of branching narrative games, and a particularly confusing final chapter, All of Us Are Dead is a must-have for any lover of zombies, visual novels, or the previous renditions of this remarkable story.