SEVEN DAYS. SIX FAMILY MEMBERS. ONE WAY OUT.
Thursday begins with a crying baby, a missing school shoe and coffee you do not have time to finish. Your partner leaves for work with the nine-month-old, the older children head to school, and you join the morning rush through Manhattan. It should have been an ordinary day.
By lunchtime, the dead are getting back up.
Your family is scattered across New York when the outbreak begins. Your partner and baby are trapped near Midtown, your thirteen-year-old is in the East Village, the younger children are stranded on the Lower East Side and every route between them is filling with frightened people and the newly infected. Then the authorities close every bridge and tunnel leaving Manhattan.
Finding your family is only the beginning. Six people need food, clean water, medicine, somewhere safe to sleep and enough nappies and formula to keep a baby alive. The infected turn within minutes, push their bodies far beyond normal human limits and refuse to remain as predictable as everybody first assumes.
You have seven days to get your partner and four children out of New York City. Every person you stop to help costs time, everything you carry adds weight and every escape route risks placing the people you love in a different kind of danger.
Can you keep all six members of your family alive long enough to leave Manhattan, or will the city take somebody before the seventh day arrives?
Key Features:
Play as a man, woman or nonbinary parent, choose your age from twenty-eight to sixty and customise your name, appearance and parental title.
Create your partner and four children, including their names, genders, nicknames and appearances. Choose every detail yourself or allow the children to inherit a believable mixture of both parents' features.
Choose one of five professions: emergency medicine resident, National Guard soldier, firefighter-paramedic, subway maintenance engineer or public-school teacher. Your training, workplace and equipment open different choices and escape routes.
Manage a real inventory containing food, water, medicine, weapons, tools, baby supplies and profession-specific equipment.
Watch the clock. Travelling, searching, helping strangers and making mistakes all consume time while Manhattan becomes more dangerous around you.
Raise survival skills such as Combat, Medicine, Athletics, Ingenuity, Influence and Nerve, while your behaviour shapes Empathy, Caution and Cooperation.
Protect your relationship with your partner and the trust holding your family together. The children are thirteen, eight, five and nine months old; each one understands and reacts to the outbreak differently.
Discover the rules of the infection through experience. What you learn about turning, strength, senses, decomposition and intelligence may decide who survives later.
Choose who you help, who you leave behind and how far you are willing to go when protecting your family conflicts with protecting everybody else.
Plan your own way out of Manhattan. A nearby bridge, the river, an organised professional convoy or temporary shelter may save the family, or trap them.