Kill or be killed, then rise from the dead and kill your friends!

Experience the opening hours of a viral undead outbreak in the city of Cypress Ridge in September 1999. Choose from a wide cast of everyday citizens, each with their own unique abilities, traits and storylines as you work together with up to three friends online or via local splitscreen to escape the undead apocalypse. Choose your team members carefully, as different characters will be able to access different areas of the game.

Your group will need to scrounge for supplies, fight off the undead, and traverse the city as you hope to find a means of escape. Death is only the beginning! As players fall, they are resurrected as zombies who have one goal: kill their former allies Each scenario features branching paths and multiple endings, with your group's decisions directly influencing their ultimate fate.

They aren’t here to save the day, they just wanna survive…but if you can’t beat ‘em, join’em!

Dead Drop Studios has officially launched its Outbreak: Shades Of Horror Kickstarter for the next entry in their long-running Outbreak series, looking to raise $62,500.

The new title will be a major step forward for the franchise as the Kickstarter campaign will provide the team with the means to work with talented artists, animators, designers and more who share their passion for classic survival horror. 

Dead Drop Studios has released seven Outbreak games since 2017 as a two-person team, working on shoestring budgets but always delivering highly ambitious games to the series’ passionate fanbase. The duo has come to Kickstarter to create the next game in their series that celebrates what fans love about the franchise while investing in providing huge upgrades and quality of life improvements to the series. The game's initial funding goal is USD$62,500 (approx. £52,000/€60,500), with stretch goals that the developers aim to reveal with each new milestone that is reached, teasing expansion packs, Board Games, CGI Movies, and even dinosaurs.

Outbreak: Shades Of Horror will focus on online co-op as multiple players are brought into a series of fresh new stories that step away from the typical horror trope of highly trained operatives that can single handedly tear through hordes of the undead. Instead, the game focuses on regular civilians working together to escape. Players must cooperate using the unique abilities of each character in order to maximize their chances of survival and escape. If a player succumbs to the infection, they'll return as another member of the undead. With their former friend now working against them, the remaining human players will have to decide whether to do the humane thing and put them down, or abandon them to join the throngs of undead flooding the city.

Potential players can get a taste of what's to come in the tense playable teaser, recently released by Dead Drop Studios. The demo is currently available across Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, and Google Stadia. For the first time, anyone with the link to the demo can play for 60 minutes on Stadia, even if they don't have an account. Players with a Stadia account will have unlimited access.

Evan Wolbach, co-founder of Dead Drop Studios, said: “Outbreak: Shades of Horror being live on Kickstarter is the realization of nearly a 10 year dream and mission. Alongside our amazing community, we're going to fully fund a next-generation spiritual successor to great survival horror experiences like Resident Evil: Outbreak! Thank you to our fans, and our amazing partners like Limited Run Games for supporting our project, and offering such amazing rewards for our backers!”

Julia Wolbach, co-founder of Dead Drop Studios, added: “Fan involvement has always been a huge part of the Outbreak experience, and we are excited to work through Kickstarter to give them the next Gen Outbreak game they deserve.”

Key Features

• Choose from a diverse cast of real-world survivors who find themselves trapped in the opening hours of an undead epidemic.
• Play the entire game as a first person shooter, third person over-the-shoulder shooter, or in retro fixed camera angles.
• Use anything you can find to survive, from firearms, to melee weapons and even your bare hands.
• Dismember the undead with location-specific damage, blasting off limbs or even their heads with a well placed shot!
• Go it alone, or bring up to three friends along in online or offline co-op across the entire story campaign and all bonus modes.
• Intense resource management inspired by retro survival horror with a modern interface.
• Crushing difficulty as you hold off a horde of the undead while desperately trying to escape.
• Solve puzzles and navigate an environment inspired by a realistic city environment.
• Modern crafting system allowing you to build new equipment, healing items, and more from the materials you find strewn around.
• Designed and influenced directly from the community's feedback to build the ultimate survival horror nightmare.

Outbreak: Shades Of Horror is in development for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC (Steam).